I thought the screenplay for Trumbo was witty and full of verve, but it’s got to be hard to write about one of the most talented screenwriters out there because the comparisons are inevitable and I must admit that Dalton Trumbo would have produced something tighter, and more energetic – something more like the man himself.
Dalton Trumbo was a successful screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1940s who also had some lofty ideals for bettering his beloved country that led him to join the Communist Party. But as we approached the 1950s, and the cold war between the Soviets and the USA deepened, people confused criticism for treachery. Trumbo and a bunch of people besides were brought up before Congress to account for their ‘unAmerican activities’ and even though Americans supposedly believed in free speech and democracy, they were sent to jail if they refused to rat on their friends.
Hollywood crumbled under pressure and refused to work with known (or suspected) “Commies”, and suddenly these people no longer had means to support their families. But Dalton Trumbo fought back: he undermined the black list by writing around it, submitted manuscripts under pen names, and continued to employ a lot of unemployable men.
Bryan Cranston plays Trumbo. No, Bryan Cranston IS Trumbo. His performance is so solid it never flags, even when the script slips down some dubious roads. Diane Lane and Elle Fanning play his wife and daughter and add a needed dimensionality to the character and his motivations, though I still feel that maybe we needed to spend more time with this interesting man’s inner life. Director Jay Roach seemed to keep things a little superficial, over-relying on his leading man’s ability to keep the motor running. Actually, the entirety of the supporting cast are lending enormous talent: Michael Stuhlbarg, John Goodman, Alan Tudyk, Louis CK, and let me not forget Helen Mirren who does a fabulous turn as a witch-hunting bitch. You can see how much fun she’s having playing such a rotten person.
I think the film is highly enjoyable, and Cranston will never be outTrumboed. That said, I think Roach left the door open for a better film to be made on the subject matter, because I found it very light on the politics, very light on the ethics, and really more of a mischievous caper as Trumbo fights to get a workaround for his career. And maybe that’s because this movie is such a departure for Roach, who has never directed outside the comedy genre before, and is best known for the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises: not exactly heady, probing stuff.
Still, I recommend this without reservations. It’s interesting and eminently well-acted, and Cranston is just a tonne of fun to watch.
Helen Mirren, the 70-year-old British bombshell, has announced that her breasts have gone into retirement. No more nude scenes, no more topless shots – “My pleasure pillows are purely for my husband now.”
Helen’s boobies first appeared to us in 1969’s Age of Consent and as recently as a 2010 (nude) photo shoot for New York magazine. They were also featured in a 2011 SNL skit entitled “Helen Mirren’s Magical Bosom.”
“Well, I didn’t know my boobs were legendary, quite honestly, at that point,” she told Alan Cumming in a recent interview, seemingly halfway between flattered and embarrassed.
Now, as often as I might cringe when a woman takes her top off in the movies (because why? Is this really necessary? Is this even nice?), I have no problem imagining that every single time Helen did it, it was from a position of power. The woman, and her cleavage, are feminist icons.
In fact, you may note that she achieved Damehood from the Queen, in the Order of the British Empire for services to the performing arts in 2003, the same year she appeared topless in Calendar Girls. Coincidence?
Helen Mirren is gorgeous at any age, but her confidence and sassiness in her 70-year-old skin is what makes her sexy, and damn is she sexy.
I hardly know how to begin summing up our crazy time at the Toronto International Film Festival. We’re actually only about halfway through our experience, but if I don’t start putting down some thoughts now, I’m going to run out of usable memory space.
Day 1
Demolition: Our first film of the festival is still probably my favourite. Music-obsessed Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild) calls this the “most rock-n-roll movie I’ve ever made” and while that’s not the descriptor that immediately came to my mind, I do get where he’s coming from. I would call this movie vigorous. It’s very alive, ironically, since it’s about a man (Davis, played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who’s been numb for the past dozen years or so. It takes the sudden death of his wife for him to realize that he probably didn’t love her. And once that realization is made, his whole life starts to tilt to the left. He becomes obsessed with understanding and improving small, safe things: the leak in his fridge, the squeak in a door, the defective hospital vending machine. A surprisingly confessional letter about the latter connects him to a lonely customer service lady (Naomi Watts) and they stumble together toward truth, just two lost souls helping each other without even meaning to. Gyllenhaal is nothing short of amazing. We see him removed from grief, literally doing whatever he can just to feel – manual labour, loud music, the embracing of pain. Gylllenhaal does disconnection eerily well. But he also has some bracing bonding scenes with a young co-star, the two careening from frank discussions about homosexuality in Home Depot, to the point-blank testing of bullet proof vests. The mourning in this movie is off-kilter to say the least, and jumpcuts and flashbacks keep the loopy momentum going – sometimes quite elegantly, as the editing and cinematography are both superb. Davis busies himself with demolition – he likes taking things apart, methodically, to see how it looks inside, but he can’t quite put it all back together. The physical demolition of his house, of the things surrounding him, serves as an apt metaphor for his sorrow, for his life up until now. It is brutal and quirky and offbeat. Gyllenhaal has been turning in solid performance after solid performance, but this one might be The One. It’s an unconventional movie but also deeply spiritual in its way. Jean-Marc Vallée, when asked after the movie about this theme, responded: “Have you ever smashed the shit out of something? It feels great!”
The Lobster: I realize now, having used words like quirky and offbeat to describe Demolition, that there aren’t words to describe this one. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is a sick man. He has imagined a world not so unlike ours, he thinks, where single people are so ostracized that it’s been made illegal to be without a spouse. When alone, they’re forced into this hotel where they either find a mate, or get turned into an animal. Many fail. Exotic animals abound.This is how we meet Colin Farrell and John C. Reilly as they desperately attempt to be lucky in love. It’s got the deadpan feel of a Wes Anderson movie, only instead of the warm and fuzzy nostalgia, there’s bleak and panicky hopelessness. This movie won’t appeal to most, or even many, but if you can stomach the brutality, this movie is not without some major laughs. And believe me, you earn them. Sean was having a little post-traumatic shock as he lef the theatre, but a few days a lots of reflection later, he found the movie to be undeniably growing on him. The movie is absurdist and bizarre and unique. It is occasionally shovel-to-the-face brutal. Lanthimos understatedly calls it a movie “about relationships”, and his leading lady, Rachel Weisz called it his most “romantic” yet.
Eye In the Sky: Helen Mirren and Barkhad Abdi joined director Gavin Hood in introducing this wonderful film to us – just icing on the cake as the film itself would have been more than enough. Helen Mirren, as you might expect, is completely compelling as a Colonel who’s been tracking radicalized British citizens for 6 years. Just as she’s found them she encounters bureaucratic hell trying to get permission to do her job – that is, to eliminate the threat. What I didn’t realize going in to this movie is that it would not solely be a vehicle for Mirren but a really strong ensemble cast who all pull their weight to give this film so many interesting layers. Drone warfare is obviously a pretty timely discussion, but this movie is also an entertaining nail-biter, successfully blending ethical dilemmas with on-the-street action thanks to Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips) who ratchets up the tension. The crux: there’s a house full of terrorists. They’re literally arming themselves for an imminent suicide attack. Capturing them is not an option – they must be killed before they kill dozens, or hundreds. But just outside this house is a little girl, selling bread. So government officials debate her fate. Mirren the military tour de force is adamant that the terrorists must be stopped at any cost. Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), the guy with the finger on the trigger, is not so sure. You can see the weight of this decision in his eyes, knowing it’s not his to make, yet doing everything in his power to stall. If he’s the heart and Mirren is the head of this operation, there are dozens of politicians muddling up the chain of command in between. The movie is asking us what is acceptable – the sacrifice of one bright little girl to save potentially dozens? The politicians waffle. The girl herself is not the problem, rather it’s the way it would look to the electoral public. How can they spin this? Who will win the propaganda war? Hood does a great job of subtly reminding us that no matter what, not everyone in the kill zone deserves to die. But at the same time, he lets us feel the urgency, lets us count the potential dead bodies if the suicide attack is allowed to continue. And who would be responsible for that? This movie never stops being tense, even when it draws uncomfortable laughter: Alan Rickman, at the head of the table of the dithering politicians, rolls his eyes for all of us as everyone passes the buck. This movie never flinches and it doesn’t take sides. There is an emotional heft to it and I felt it on a visceral level when this sweet little girl is callously referred to as but “one collateral damage issue.” Oof.
Sicario: Matt was ultimately disappointed with the film but was still lucky enough to be at the premiere where Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro were both on hand to answer questions along with Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.
We Monsters: A German film by Sebastian Ko about a mother and father who follow their most primal instinct to protect their teenaged daughter even as she commits an unspeakable crime. It’s weirdly relatable and abhorrent at the same time, and keeps asking us what we would do even as it pushes the envelope to deeper and darker places. Many shots are obstructed, keeping shady characters exactly that, a little out of focus, a little blurred, a little on the sly. The cinematographer cultivates a sense of dread expertly, boxing those characters in, keeping the shots almost claustrophobic. There’s a real sense of panic, of increasing alarm and desperation, and it’s not easy to watch. But it is kind of fascinating. Afterward, Ko was on hand to answer questions, and when someone asked him about the recurrent shots of a butterfly eventually emerging from its cocoon, he confessed that at first it was just meant as a metaphor for adolescence, but in the end he was struck that what emerged was a “pretty ugly creature” and made for a pretty fitting parallel.
I was disappointed that Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, and Alan Rickman were not at this morning’s encore screening of Eye in the Sky. Maybe they celebrated too hard after last night’s premiere.
That was the one and only disappointment of the whole experience. Eye in the Sky may in fact have exceeded my expectations. Director Gavin Hood had already addressed the subject of the moral sacrifices in preventing terror attacks in 2006’s Rendition but not nearly as effectively as he does here. When a drone strike targeting several known terrorists in Somalia – who can disperse any minute making it impossible to track all of them – becomes much more complicated when a little girl enters the kill zone. Commanding officers, drone pilots, and politicians from three countries must weigh the pros, cons, ends, and means as they desperately try and force someone else to make the tough decision. Risk killing one child to save 80 children? It’s tense as hell, beautifully shot, and funny. I would be interested in hearing from Jay and Sean, who were at last night’s premiere, whether their audience reacted so enthusiastically to the humour in the middle act as the desperate passing of the buck starts to resemble farce.
I should mention that, despite the absence of some of the film’s bigger stars, Barkhad Abdi (Oscar-nominated for his fantastic supporting work in Captain Philips) got up early to join Hood onstage for a thought-provoking and lively question period. I am not sure when Eye in the Sky is due for wide release but I hope a lot of people go see it.
Matt wrote last week about the choices he made for his viewing pleasure (and hopefully your reading one) at the Toronto International Film Festival, slated to open with a bang (or rather, a star-studded screening of Demolition) on September 10.
I held mine back because the truth is, the TIFF selection process was not a fun one for me. TIFF has weird rules where it takes your money and then weeks later gives you a “randomly” selected window of just 60 minutes for making your choices – I’m seeing maybe 20 movies out of over 430, by my count, so that’s an awful lot of frantic sifting, choosing, replacing, and scheduling to do in just 60 minutes. It goes without saying that I was “randomly” selected to choose more than 24 hours later than Matt, which meant that a lot of my first, second, and third choices were “off-sale”. Off-sale doesn’t mean sold out, it means that they’re holding some tickets back for when they go on sale to the general public. And nothing against the general public, but I paid my oodles of money, I’m travelling in from out of town, and I don’t think it’s very nice or very fair to force me (since I’ve prepaid for tickets) to see movies that aren’t selling as well, when someone who pays a nominal $25 on the day of will have better luck than me.
I’ll stop my belly-aching now. We’re still pretty lucky to be going at all and I know that. So, without further whining about first world problems, my TIFF picks:
Demolition: I’m actually going to see this one with both Matt and Sean, so it’s a rarity, and I’m not only looking forward to seeing what director Jean-Marc Vallée can squeeze out of Jake Gyllenhaal, I also can’t wait to discuss it with my favourite movie-going friends.
The Lobster: This one is quirky as hell and right up my alley, and I never thought I’d be saying that about a Colin Farrell movie. Newly heartbroken, he checks into a hotel where he’s under the gun to find a mate within a super tight time period – or risk being turned into an animal and put out to pasture? It sounds more like a child’s drawing than a movie, but there you have it.
Eye in the Sky: We ‘re doing the red-carpet treatment of this one on Friday night, and Dame Helen Mirren is confirmed to attend. She’s looking less glamorous in the still from this movie, playing a Colonel who’s spent a long time tracking down a radicalized citizen who must be stopped. But when drone operator Aaron Paul reports that a small child has wandered into the kill zone, the team has to decide whether the casualty of this little girl is acceptable collateral damage. Yowza!
The Martian: You may know that I have been frothing about this movie for months now. I luuuurved the book and passed it along to all of my literate friends but then waved a flag of skepticism when I heard that a) it’s directed by Ridley Scott b) it’s a reteaming of Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain, lately seen together in Interstellar. But I hope hope HOPE that they “science the hell” out of this thing and blow my fucking socks off.
The Danish Girl: Eddie Redmayne is almost certainly in the running for a second Oscar for his portrayal of Lili Elbe, the 1920s Danish artist who was one of the first known recipients of sexual reassignment surgery. The trailer alone looks so lush that I’m drooping to see it – which is fortunate, because TIFF stuck me with TWO pairs of tickets to this. Woops! Anyone know someone who’s looking for a pair?
Freeheld: We’re seeing this one on flashy premiere night as well and will see both Julianne Moore and Ellen Page walk the red carpet. They star as a real-life couple from New Jersey who just want Moore’s pension to go to Page when Moore passes away. It was a huge case for LGBT rights and I’m betting that both of these ladies really bring it.
The Dressmaker: Funny story. I read this book recently, in anticipation of this movie. And I really, really liked it. Only: it’s about a young dressmaker who survives the sinking of the Titanic thanks to her wealthy employer. Knowing that Kate Winslet was set to star, I was shocked that she’d choose to go back to Titanic in this way. I mean, if anyone can put it off, it’s Winslet, but still. The more I read, the more I thought maybe she’s not playing the dressmaker, maybe she’s playing the plucky journalist. I still couldn’t believe the press wasn’t making a bigger deal out of this, but it wasn’t until I finished the book that I realized that I’d read the wrong Dressmaker. Same title, different author. Oopsie daisy again. But I’m confident this one’s good too, and it’s Kate Winslet, so we’re almost guaranteed to see boob.
Into the Forest: Here’s a movie that looks so familiar to me in the trailer that I believe I have read the book. I do not know for sure that it’s based on a book and I’m not looking it up. This way even I’ll be surprised (or, REALLY surprised!). Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page star as sisters who live in a remote cabin in the woods. The world is on the verge of the apocalypse and their location keeps them safe, but also leaves them vulnerable…
Anomalisa: This is the Charlie Kaufman-directed stop-motion animated ode to a motivational speaker and his bleak existence. I have no idea what to expect from it and that’s why I’m so crazy excited. It could go a lot of ways but no matter what, I do believe I’ll be seeing something special.
About Ray: Have you ever attended a red carpet event in the middle of the afternoon? Me neither! TIFF is so jam-packed with gliterry premieres that it starts packing them in at odd times just to get through them all. I’m tickled we got tickets to this (hard won, believe me) and I’m anxious to see if it’s as good as it looks, and if this and The Danish Girl will cancel each other out (though this one is also about a gender transition, it’s set in modern day, with Elle Fanning as the young woman who wants to be a young man, Naomi Watts as her mother, and Susan Sarandon as her mother.
Miss You Already: This might be a little too chick-flicky to be regular festival fare, but it’s Toni Collette so say what you want, but my ass will be in that seat at the ungodly hour of 8:45 in the goddamned morning. Toni and Drew Barrymore play lifelong friends whose friendship hits a bit of a roadbump when one discovers she’s pregnant just as the other gets a cancer diagnosis. Note to Sean: bring tissues, or an extra-absorbent shirt.
Maggie’s Plan: Starring the delightful Greta Gerwig, Maggie’s plan to have a baby on her own is derailed when she falls in love with a married man (Ethan Hawke) and destroys his relationship with his brilliant wife (Julianne Moore). I like Gerwig a whole lot but to be honest, I’m really wondering how this dynamic is going to work – and I’m super intrigued to find out how Bill Hader fits into the mix. Julianne Moore is going to be one busy lady at this festival!
The Family Fang: Directed by and starring Jason Bateman, he plays a brother to Nicole Kidman, both returning to the family home in search of their super-famous parents who seem to have disappeared. Jason Bateman is a little hit or miss for me but I committed on the off chance that the man playing his father – legendary Christopher MotherFucking Walken – might be in attendance. He’s not slated as far as I can tell, but I’d kick myself right in the sitter if he was and I wasn’t.
Legend: Tom Hardy plays real-life English gangsters. Yes, plural: the Kray twins. This dual role is getting a lot of buzz and since I seem to be mesmerized by Hardy in nearly everything he does, I’m super excited to check this one out.
Biggest TIFF regret: Missing Room. We’ll be back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto, but this particular movie only plays twice during the whole festival, and neither screening is on a day I’m there. I loved this book and am anxious to see the movie treatment. Good or bad, I want to pass judgement. I want to feast my little eyes. I am heartbroken to miss this one.
Two questions:
We still have some tickets to alocate. Any suggestions?
If you were in The Lobster hotel and failed to find a mate – what animal would you be turned into. Me? An otter. Definitely an otter.
We’ll be posting updates as we go, and be sure to check out our Twitter @assholemovies for photos of the red carpet premieres!
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is a famous painting by Gustav Klimt, the last and most representative of his “golden phase”, so-called because the oil painting is literally covered in painstakingly applied gold leaf. Adele’s husband commissioned it; the Bloch-Bauers were both friends and patrons of the artist Klimt and this portrait hung proudly in their home until Nazis stole it during the second world war, as the luckier of Adele’s family fled, and the unlucky died in death camps.
Today we know her simply as “Woman in Gold” because Nazis felt Klimt was distasteful (not quite Aryan enough, I suppose) so Austria hung it on the walls of a museum, pretending it was rightfully theirs, and white-washing the fact that its subject was a Jew.
The movie tells the “true” story of Maria Altmann, Adele’s beloved niece, as she tries to win this and several other pieces of family artwork back from the Austrian government. Austria, in a bid for good PR, opened its courts to “art repatriation” and gave families the chance to claim the things unlawfully taken from them during the war. Of course, Austria never intended to let go of things they now consider to be national treasures (and this Klimt alone is said to be worth $100 million). So while they smile and nod at Maria, her request is rejected, and likely never actually considered.
So Maria lawyers up, choosing noob Ryan Reynolds because he has Austrian roots instead of experience or knowledge. And this connection does push him to do good work, to pursue this for years through any venue he can. But the actor Ryan Reynolds isn’t quite up to the task. He pales beside Helen Mirren, but he also struggles to bring any gravitas or seriousness to a role that demands it. So it’s hard to take this as a drama about justice and redemption when it is cast like a romcom.
But I did feel emotionally compelled by the material. Maria’s life is told in flashbacks to her Viennese life just before the Nazis invaded and the Austrians welcomed them with open arms, and flowers. Now she’s seeking to right wrongs committed half a century ago, wrongs that still smart and always will, and that can’t really ever be reconciled. A painting can be physically returned, but not so of her parents’ lives. Maria goes to Austria only reluctantly – too many painful memories – and finds that the people there have not entirely let the past go: she finds a kind-hearted journalist willing to help, but is also accosted by a total stranger who basically gives her a “you people” speech and tells her to let the Holocaust go.
The movie gives her (and us) a fabulous Hollywood ending. The case garners enough attention that they shame the committee into (eventually) doing the right thing. Maria refuses to sell the painting, instead opting to find it a home in America, where she too has fled, and built a new life. But in real life, when Maria reclaimed the painting, she turned around and sold it for 135 million dollars, and while it is absolutely her right to do so, I guess the script writer thought it took a little away from the triumph to make this known. So while I enjoyed this movie, I think it let us down. It didn’t respect the audience or the character enough to let her stand as is – not as caricature of virtuosity and justice, but a real, live human being who went through hell and is still, all these years later, trying to put the pieces back together however she can.
I only watched this movie because Helen Mirren was nominated as Best Actress in a motion picture, musical or comedy by the Golden Globes for this very role. She’s a twelve-time nominee with four wins under her fabulous belt. I think she’s great, and not just in a girl-crush kinda way (though definitely in that way as well), but in that I find her elegant to watch on screen. She usually make good choices, and as the film is backed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Steven Speilberg, I was a little let down to find this one was more hamburger than filet mignon.
It’s about Madame Mallory (Mirren), a restaurateur of a fine French establishment who is horrified when foreigners open up a curry shop not 100 feet from her front door. She tries to harass them out of business but eventually must admit that their young cook (Manish Dayal) is superior to her own.
The food porn is fabulous, and of course I watched it on an empty stomach (confidential to Matt: butter chicken tonight?) but it’s not enough to hurdle over the holes in the plot, which is dashed sparingly throughout the movie like so much spice, along with pounds of clichés and a good measure of cultural stereotype to boot. Not to mention the slow burn (but maybe you’re looking for a movie to nap to?) and the schmaltziness that Mirren and co-star Om Puri should be above.
It’s predictable and pompously-titled, and at one point I found myself really bothered by the score, which was overdramatic (sounds like Schindler’s List, is actually over melting ice in a bucket of fish). The cast is solid (Dayal is a serious cutie) but in Lasse Hallstrom’s cinematic food fight, baguette vs naan, all you end up with is a bit of sliced Wonderbread with the crusts cut off.
I’m actually kind of partial to the films of 1994 because it was the 1995 Oscar ceremony, honouring the best of ’94, that got me hooked on all things Oscar. In honour of my upcoming 20th annual Oscar party, I decided to check this movie out- one of the few that I still hadn’t seen from that year.
In The Madness of King George, Nigel Hawthorne plays King George II during his struggle with mental illness (never so-called in the film for obvious reasons) in the late 1780’s. The pretty much always awesome Helen Mirren plays his wife Queen Charlotte who has no idea what to do with him. “It was something he ate!” she yells at no one in particular while the King derails a concert by storming the stage swatting away anyone trying to assist him.
The Madness of King George is quite well-done until the photo finish ending where the king races to Parliament to prove that he’s sane again before his son the Prince of Wales, played as a complete dickwad by Rupert Everett, can be declared Regent. I still have mixed feelings about this movie though, mostly about Dr. Willis, played by Ian Holm (old Bilbo Baggins). On the one hand, his theorizing about power’s connection to madness is interesting. All mad men think of themselves as kings, he muses. What fantasy then does a mad king take refuge in? It’s the feedback we get from others, including the insults and constructive criticism that shapes us so how can you keep a grip on reality when everyone around you looks to you as royalty? It’s a good question worth thinking about. Although, with medical hindsight being 20/20, they seem pretty sure now that the king’s madness was due to a rare blood disorder, not believing his own hype.
Dr. Willis’ answer to this is behavioural modification, basically meaning that the patient will be put in restraints every time he misbehaves (e.g. talking crazy, not eating, swearing etc.). Ok, I know that this is 1788 but, working in mental health myself, I was a little disturbed to see this practice potrayed as almost heroic rather than (again, hindsight 20/20) primitive. Compared to the king’s other doctors, of course, Willis was quite forward-thinking. One doctor is hilariously outraged at the impropriety of conducting a physical examination of the king while another just can’t get enough royal crap to examine.
It was hell to be declared mad in 1788. You can see it on the king’s face every now and then, when he becomes temporarily lucid enough to wonder what is happening to him. I would have rather the film focus on this more, instead of finding a doctor to declare as hero just because he is a little less incompetent or inhumane than the rest.
screenwriters out there because the comparisons are inevitable and I must admit that Dalton Trumbo would have produced something tighter, and more energetic – something more like the man himself.
longer had means to support their families. But Dalton Trumbo fought back: he undermined the black list by writing around it, submitted manuscripts under pen names, and continued to employ a lot of unemployable men.
ed to keep things a little superficial, over-relying on his leading man’s ability to keep the motor running. Actually, the entirety of the supporting cast are lending enormous talent: Michael Stuhlbarg, John Goodman, Alan Tudyk, Louis CK, and let me not forget Helen Mirren who does a fabulous turn as a witch-hunting bitch. You can see how much fun she’s having playing such a rotten person.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 