Tag: Vince Cefalu

Thanksgiving Smörgåsbord: ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ – ‘Roman J. Israel, Esq.’ – ‘Last Flag Flying’ – ‘Lady Bird’

Four auteured films.

No superheroes.
No space battles.
No remakes.

Let’s get it on.

Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh
Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage, Caleb Landry Jones, Kerry Condon, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Abbie Cornish, Lucas Hedges, Zeljko Ivanek, Amanda Warren, Malaya Rivera Drew, Sandy Martin, Christopher Berry, Jerry Winsett, Kathryn Newton, Samara Weaving, Clarke Peters, Nick Searcy
Soundtrack: Carter Burwell

Whether it was ever his intention or not, it’s completely fair to refer to Martin McDonagh as the British Isles’ answer to the Coen Brothers.

I mean, all three of his films (In Bruges, Seven Psycopaths, and now Three Billboards) have been crime-related dark comedies, all scored by Carter Burwell, and now he’s finally recruited Frances McDormand as his leading lady.

Not that I’m at all complaining, or throwing shade, or saying he’s ripping anyone off.  He’s not.  His stories are original, his characters are unique, and his films ultimately stick with you, Three Billboards most especially.

I rarely delve into plot, but I’m not spoiling anything by saying that the movie in a nutshell is about a mother’s search for justice for her slain daughter, in a rather messy and definitely confrontational way, weaving a tangled web involving everyone around her.

Three Billboards is fiery, brash, foul-mouthed, and not afraid to go to some dark places, yet somehow, in a very twisted, Martin McDonagh way, it has genuine heart and humanity, which is maybe the most surprising thing about it.

Of course, the movie would not be nearly as noteworthy without quality performances, which you get from almost everybody you need to get them from (I wouldn’t be surprised to see McDormand get some awards season buzz).  The only one who threw me was Abbie Cornish, because I thought she had an American accent early on, but then at one point she slipped into an English accent and kept it for the rest of the movie; I’m still confused as to why.

All-in-all though, Three Billboards, not unexpectedly, is one of the best of the year.

Rating: ★★★★½ (out of five)

 

Written and Directed by Dan Gilroy
Cast: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo, Lynda Gravatt, Amanda Warren, Hugo Armstrong, Sam Gilroy, Tony Plana, DeRon Horton, Amari Cheatom, Vince Cefalu, Nazneen Contractor, Robert Prescott, Shelley Hennig, Annie Sertich, Esperanza Spalding, Jessica Camacho, Ajgie Kirkland, Ludwig Manukian, Joseph David-Jones, Pej Vahdat, Henry G. Sanders, Miles Heizer
Soundtrack: James Newton Howard

Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut was Nightcrawler, which was one of the best films of 2014, and is still one of the best L.A. movies of recent vintage.

It’s a harsh standard to live up to, but Roman J. Israel, Esq. is no Nightcrawler.

Not that I’m going to compare and contrast them to death, because they are ultimately different, but they do both revolve around eccentric characters who come out of their shells a bit and take massive risks for the sake of sizable financial gain.

In the case of Nightcrawler, you’re glued to the screen from start to finish, and the third act in particular is unrelentingly thrilling.

Israel, on the other hand, is very muddled.

Denzel Washington’s performance in the titular role is compelling to watch, and is generally on par with any of the great performances of his career.  The problem is that there’s not much else around him (Colin Farrell in particular feels a little directionless), and in the end I’m left wondering if the movie is trying to be profound and failing, or attempting to be meaningless as a statement, but it’s not clear to me either way, leaving me feeling just a bit empty.

If you’re a huge Denzel fan, Roman J. Israel, Esq. is maybe worth a rental down the road, but that’s about it.

Rating: ★★½ (out of five)

 

Directed by Richard Linklater
Written by Richard Linklater & Darryl Ponicsan, based on his novel of the same name
Cast: Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, J. Quinton Johnson, Deanna Reed-Foster, Yul Vazquez, Cicely Tyson
Soundtrack: Graham Reynolds

To be perfectly honest, I don’t have a particularly high opinion of Richard Linklater as a filmmaker, but I was willing to put that aside for a movie that appears to have a great cast, and a story that serves as a spiritual sequel to 1973’s The Last Detail (which is also based on a Darryl Ponicsan novel and is a movie I would recommend).

Linklater admittedly specializes in films where not a whole lot actually happens, and sometimes such movies can work really well, but Last Flag Flying is not one of them.

In terms of the core (Corps?) performances, Steve Carell is great, Laurence Fishburne is fine, and Bryan Cranston is sub-par.

I know that’s a heretical statement, because he’s everyone’s favorite actor because Breaking Bad is the greatest (he’s one of mine, too), but Bryan Cranston is not beyond a turkey of a performance from time to time; I’ve seen it happen before.  And I don’t necessarily blame him, because if this is the performance he brought or the performance he was directed to, and nobody told him it wasn’t great, that’s not his fault.

Anyway, it’s not like he’s the only problem.

The movie overall (especially in the dialogue) feels like a college film (not to mention its an early 2000s period piece that sometimes cares about the details and sometimes doesn’t care at all).  Whether Linklater or Ponicsan is more at fault for the lackluster script, I don’t know, but since this was Linklater’s baby, I’m going to leave the blame on his doorstep.

To put it the most simply, this is a movie that needs to feel real and just doesn’t.  The most egregious example is the mildly antagonistic Marine colonel, who is made-up and lit to look like a pale vampire, as if it’s not already painfully obvious that we are supposed to dislike him.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe Last Flag Flying perfectly portrays the dynamic of three old military buddies getting together after forty years, but it mostly just strikes me as off-base.

Definitely check out The Last Detail though, if you’ve not already seen it.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

 

Written and Directed by Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothée Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, Stephen Henderson, Lois Smith, Odeya Rush, Kathryn Newton, Jake McDorman, Bayne Gibby, Laura Marano, Andy Buckley, Jordan Rodrigues, Kristen Cloke, Daniel Zovatto, Bob Stephenson, Marielle Scott, Myra Turley, Richard Jin, Ithamar Enriquez, Carla Valentine
Soundtrack: Jon Brion

Talk about a surprise.

I really only saw this movie because I needed to kill time before something else, so perhaps it benefits from my complete lack of expectation, but I am honestly at a loss to find much fault with Lady Bird.

I don’t know too much about Greta Gerwig, other than she appears in movies I don’t see because I have no interest in them, but she really knocked it out of the park with this one.  If the “teen girl coming-of-age” sub-genre hasn’t been done to death by now, it’s definitely in a stale place, and yet everything about Lady Bird feels fresh (and it’s an early 2000s period piece that actually cares the whole time, unlike certain other movies).

One of the major reasons why the film works so well is that it’s short, sweet, and to the point, because it covers pretty much a whole year in our main character’s life in ninety minutes, paradoxically using the whole cow and trimming all the fat at the same time.

It’s a fairly familiar story: Senior-itis, young love, teen rebellion, trying to be cool, applying to colleges, etc., but everything feels pretty spot on and earnest, unlike other similar movies where characters often feel like caricatures more so than real people.

Much like Three Billboards (if not to a larger extent), everyone who needs to turn in a quality performance in Lady Bird does so (Tracy Letts in particular stuck out to me in his supporting role as the dad).  Saoirse Ronan is the star, to be sure, but this is ensemble casting at its finest.

It might not be quite appropriate for actual teenagers (and, given that it takes place in a time before they were born, I don’t know that they’d get out of it what a thirty-something audience would), but it definitely belongs in the pantheon of the genre, and it’s for sure one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

Surprisingly.

Rating: ★★★★½ (out of five)

Twofer Movie Review – ‘Suburbicon’ and ‘Thank You For Your Service’ – The War at Home

I guess at this point I’ve now officially, completely come full circle.

The genesis of my writings here came in the wake of seeing George Clooney’s The Monuments Men, which I went into wanting to love but in the end just couldn’t, but I realized that I had a lot to say about it.  So, after a few months, I created this space to share my thoughts, and three-plus years later I’m still doing it.

So, thanks, George Clooney?

I’m certainly not going to thank him for Suburbicon.

Suburbicon

Directed by George Clooney
Written by Joel & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe, Jack Conley, Glenn Fleshler, Steve Monroe, Gary Basaraba, Ellen Crawford, Alex Hassell, Steven M. Porter, Pamela Dunlap, Robert Pierce, Vince Cefalu
Soundtrack: Alexandre Desplat

Perhaps someone else has already drawn this comparison, but I see George Clooney and Angelina Jolie as equivalents: fine leading actors who have made for less-than-stellar directors, each suffering from the same issues, namely tone and focus.

Suburbicon is not at all dissimilar from The Monuments Men (or Unbroken for Jolie) in that both are fantastic-looking period pieces with great casts giving quality but ultimately undirected performances, and both can’t figure out what kind of movie they want to be.

At the time, I gave Clooney some benefit of the doubt for Monuments Men because I figured maybe he had just taken on too much as the writer, director, and star.  For Suburbicon, however, he has no such cover, because he’s not in the film, so I’m left to conclude that he simply is who he is as a filmmaker.  In the case of both movies, they could have been great in the hands of different directors; specifically, Steven Soderbergh for Monuments Men, and the Coen Brothers for Suburbicon (who had some role in the script for both this film, and, again, Unbroken).

Regardless, Suburbicon is, in a word, unfulfilling.  It’s a satire with no punch, a dark comedy with no laughs, and a MacGuffin of No MacGuffin (which you can do if you’re the Coen Brothers, but Clooney is no Coen, as much as I’m sure he’d like to be).

Even worse though, it’s distasteful, as one of the through lines of the film is the introduction of Suburbicon’s first black family, the Mayers, whose arrival is greeted with shock, outrage, and, eventually, violence (all of which is a barely-veiled reference to the real-life William and Daisy Meyers, the first black couple in Levittown, PA, whose arrival was met with similar unrest).  If this was actually worked into the plot somehow, or if it was more than just the two children who had interaction, I probably would feel differently about it, but as it is it’s just kind of in the background, which feels plain wrong (not to mention the timing relative to current events is not great).

However, I will mention one silver lining on this thundercloud of Suburbicon doom, and that is Oscar Isaac.  His screen-time is all too brief, but his performance is fantastic, and his character is about the only one with any explicit motivation, so, kudos to him.

In the end though, Suburbicon as a whole is a failure, and I can’t in good conscience recommend it.

Sorry, George.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

 

Thank You For Your Service

Written and Directed by Jason Hall
Based on the book by David Finkel
Cast: Miles Teller, Haley Bennett, Joe Cole, Amy Schumer, Beulah Koale, Scott Haze, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Kate Lyn Sheil, Erin Darke, Kerry Cahill, Omar J. Dorsey, Brad Beyer, Allison King, Jayson Warner Smith, Tony Winters
Soundtrack: Thomas Newman

Another week, another based-on-a-true-story movie starring Miles Teller (he’s really carved out a niche there, hasn’t he?).

This is a hard movie for me to judge due to the subject matter.   I am for sure not a veteran, let alone a combat veteran of America’s most recent armed conflicts, so I understand that my opinion in this case carries less weight, and I’m always curious to see what consensus the military community comes to on this kind of film, but in the meantime, I just know what my eyes and ears tell me.

Thank You For Your Service is the story of a few soldiers attempting to adjust to life back home after returning from a nearly year-long deployment in Iraq, and is the feature debut of writer/director Jason Hall, who previously wrote the screenplay for American Sniper.

Right off the bat, I’ll say that I found American Sniper to be much more impactful, probably because Clint Eastwood is an infinitely more experienced filmmaker (not to mention he had a bigger budget and more action-driven material to work with).  Thank You For Your Service isn’t terrible, it’s definitely better than a movie-of-the-week production, but I’m reluctant to call it exceptional.

I haven’t read the book it’s adapted from, but I have a feeling if I did read it I’d often be asking, “Why did they put X in and not Y?”  I’m not unsympathetic; I know it’s tough to put everything you want into a film, it’s a condensed medium, but there was more I wanted to see once the movie ended that I felt should have been included, so that’s one strike.

Also, the core cast is fine (again, not great, but acceptable), but there were a few minor characters whose scenes took me out of the movie.  I get it, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but if it’s in a movie, it needs to be believable for the audience (see: verisimilitude), so that’s another strike.

Ultimately, while I feel it could have brought more to the table, Thank You For Your Service just barely gets on base because I think movies like this are important.  In an era where the gap between civilian and military has never been wider, we need films and other media like this to help understand and develop some empathy for what it really means when we send our troops into harm’s way, and the physical, emotional, and mental toll it takes on them.

Thank You For Your Service is far from perfect, but at the very least it’s a step in the right direction.

Rating: ★★★☆☆