Category: Film

REVIEW: Darkest Hour

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

The Oscars happened this past Sunday, prompting, as always, a great deal of praise, backlash, and warring responses. People have celebrated Jordan Peele’s screenwriting win for Get Out and argued Guillermo del Toro’s victories, with The Shape of Water taking Best Director and Best Picture. One of the most controversial wins seems to have been Best Actor, which was awarded to Gary Oldman of Darkest Hour.

Darkest Hour chronicles Winston Churchill during his appointment to, and very early days in, the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. During these early days, fellow politicians are relentlessly pressuring him to attempt to negotiate a peace treaty with Adolf Hitler, whose control is rapidly spreading across all of Western Europe. Churchill refuses to consider the idea of a peaceful resolution; in one particularly impactful and memorable scene, he shouts, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”

The main plot that rides along with the conflict of the film is that of Dunkirk and Calais, where the last of the British army has been trapped by rapidly advancing German forces. This is interesting given that the movie Dunkirk was also released last year, which focuses entirely on the battles being waged while the high-tension conversations of Darkest Hour were taking place. Darkest Hour doesn’t entirely measure up to that level of excitement, for understandable reasons, but it does include quite a lot of impassioned arguing, quotable speeches, and shouting within small rooms. In other words, it’s true to form: It’s about Churchill.

The best thing about the film is probably Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill. He looks just like him (a feat which earned the film an Oscar win for Best Makeup and Hairstyling), and he offers what many have agreed to be one of the most convincing portrayals of his career. There are many conflicting sides to Churchill — he could be courteous and caring, but he could also be brusque and abrasive. During one memorable scene from the movie, Churchill is dining with King George VI, who tells him that many people — including the King himself — find him intimidating. Churchill seems surprised, but it’s not hard to see why people would be intimidating — as George points out, one can never be sure how Churchill will react to anything. Whether or not he deserved the Oscar for it (my opinion is no, but only because Daniel Kaluuya from Get Out was also in the running), Oldman is wildly impressive and convincing throughout.

The film has a few weak points, mostly in terms of its inclusion of women. The poster for the movie features two female characters — Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James as Clementine Churchill and Elizabeth Layton, respectfully — which seems promising at first glance. However, this proves to be somewhat misleading. Thomas and James offer very strong performances, but they aren’t given very much screen time to work with, and they seem somewhat incidental to the plot, especially in comparison with the many male characters.

Ultimately, the film is indeed a very strong period drama, and it succeeds in its twin missions of documenting an important moment in history and elucidating some of the mysterious facets of Churchill’s character. Given the immense strength of so many other films released last year, I personally think it lacks some originality in comparison. However, viewed independently, it is a strong piece of film and an enlightening character study of one of the major figures of the twentieth century.

REVIEW: Black Panther

Corrina Lee Leave a comment

All movies owe a debt to their predecessors. It is impossible to watch a film without noting the various influences that have inspired it. This is even truer for genre films which often share entire story structures, churning out movies that are indistinguishable from each other. Superhero flicks, especially, have been accused of blurring together into a colorful, entertaining, and infinitely duplicable pictures. Each superhero, no matter if he (and it’s almost always a ‘he’) can fly, lift cars with a single hand, or just run really, really fast, seems like the same combination of bravery and self-sacrifice. Iron Man may quip a little bit more often than his stoic counterpart, Captain America, but their stories are told in a similar fashion with the familiar notes of a origin story, a challenging villain, and ultimately, total victory. It is these notes that Black Panther manages to sidestep almost entirely in favor of depicting something new and inventive. In doing so, the film separates itself from other Marvel efforts in both its plot and imagery.

Although the audience is being introduced to Wakanda for the first time, for T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), this is a country and a culture that he has been immersed in his whole life. After his father’s death, he immediately begins assuming the proper rituals and customs that come with the ascendancy to both the throne and the title of the Black Panther. He has been raised to be a king and it shows in his carefully reserved grief, in his every deliberate movement. It is this quiet confidence and familiarity that infuses the movie with a sense of purpose. This is not a superhero in the making, someone slowly coming to terms with his powers. This is a man who was born into the responsibility. However, even though he may have always expected the throne, he perhaps never considered coming into power this early. And there are some challenges that Wakandan tradition cannot prepare him for, especially the centuries long isolation that has kept Wakanda’s technological advances secure. All these challenges are represented in the character of Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan).

Killmonger is not the typically bland Marvel villain craving world domination or the vague concept of power. Instead, he is a deeply wounded human being who has seen the oppression regularly endured by Wakanda’s African brothers and sisters. The reality of this oppression is never far from the movie on the screen which regularly references slavery, colonialism, and the continuing racism that has ravaged the continent of Africa. The proposition of a country unaffected by all of this is an opportunity to explore what could have been and what is still at stake. Although movies, especially those in the superhero genre, are seen as an escape from the headlines displaying the latest tragedy, Black Panther actively chooses to engage in these issues through the frame of a fictional country. This is how the movie transcends the usual clichés and tropes. It is how it moves from interesting to compelling and impossible to ignore. The movie always treats it’s subjects and their decisions as crucial and impactful. None of their actions come without consequences. Even the world of Wakanda demonstrates this with everything from planes that flare their wings like hawks to soaring skyscrapers that arch and twist. Everything speaks to a defined history. Contrasting this careful treatment with other examples in the genre where death is defied at every turn and injuries are brushed off without explanation is like the difference between watching a Saturday morning cartoon and a documentary. Both are entertaining and may present value, but in radically different ways.

Of course, it helps that this vision is carried out with grace by Ryan Coogler and his cast. T’Challa fights alongside a team of strong characters, especially strong women. Shuri (Letitia Wright), T’Challa’s younger sister, and Okoye (Danai Gurira), the leader of the king’s bodyguard, are particular standouts. Like Okoye, the movie is strong and emotionally complex. Like Shuri, it is unafraid to spit in the face of tradition and have a little fun. And like T’Challa, it is willing to examine the past and bring about a new future, not only for superhero films, but for all movies.

PREVIEW: Darkest Hour

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

The Oscars are almost upon us, and all the buzz surrounding recent movies is finally going to come to a head. Lady Bird turned heads last fall for its run as the best-reviewed film ever on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has proved both stunningly unexpected and stunningly controversial; and Call Me By Your Name has received praise for its intimate presentation of a 1980s gay romance in Italy.

One of the few Big Picture nominees that I actually haven’t heard that much about, surprisingly, is Darkest Hour. Darkest Hour stars Gary Oldman — a longtime seasoned actor, who may be recently remembered for his role as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise — as Winston Churchill during his early days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It promises to resemble both a character study of Churchill himself as well as a document of many of the political conversations behind World War II and the spread of Nazi Germany. This will be an interesting angle because one of the other big films this year, Dunkirk, portrays the other side of those conversations: the actual military conflict.

Darkest Hour looks to be a serious and impressive political drama, and I look forward to seeing whether it will live up to its peers. It is currently showing at the Quality 16 in Ann Arbor.

REVIEW: The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2018 — Animated.

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List:
Dear Basketball – Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant, USA, 5 min.
Negative Space – Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata, France, 5 min.
Lou – Dave Mullins and Dana Murray, USA, 7 minutes
Revolting Rhymes – Jakob Schuh and Jan Lachauer, UK, 29 minutes
Garden Party – Victor Caire and Gabriel Grapperon, France 7 minutes
Lost Property Office (additional film) – Daniel Agdag, Australia, 10 minutes
Weeds (additional film) – Kevin Hudson, USA, 3 minutes
Achoo (additional film) – Elise Carret, Camille Lacroix, Charlotte Perroux, Lucas Boutrot, Maoris Creantor, Pierre Hubert, France, 7 minutes

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Somehow, The Boss Baby is now an Oscar-nominated film – and so maybe it’s sufficient to say it’s been a darn slow year for animation.

But even with an unexpected nomination in the category, there’s no lack of talent featured in the animated Oscar Nominated Shorts of this year. Dear Basketball, Negative Space, Lou, Revolting Rhymes, and Garden Party are all contenders. Lost Property Office, Weeds, and Achoo are additional, highly-commended films you can catch in theatres alongside the Oscar nods.

In 2018, Kobe Bryant is now both a star basketball player and a star film producer, with Dear Basketball penned as a love letter to the end of an illustrious career. It’s sweet and simple, pleasant to watch, but probably more touching for basketball fans than for the uninterested layperson.

Despite a narrative that perhaps borders upon just being a highlight reel of Kobe Bryant’s career, Glen Keane does what Glen Keane does – just as he had in many other short films like Duet and Nephtali, and just as he did for Disney. His animation style in undeniably compelling, sketches full of a motion and fluidity that fills us in where the film may come up empty in terms of a more captivating story.

Opposite of what Dear Basketball may lack, Negative Space gives life to a suitcase, to the simpleness of Ron Koertge’s poem with clothes like a tidal wave, belts slithering like snakes into the sides of a bag. The premise is easy, but the execution is sophisticated.

A boy floats in an ocean of clothes and emerges between of the buttons of his dad’s shirt. A taxi cab drives onto wooden floorboards and becomes a toy car circling around the living room. These are beautiful transitions done through stop-motion, a creative practice in breathing tone and vision into a script. It’s uncomplicated at only five minutes long, but the visuals are delicate, creative, and with an incredible punch line.

The obligatory Pixar nomination of the year is Lou – cute and heart-warming and absolutely beautifully rendered. It follows the story of a pile of lost and found objects that becomes the guardian of the playground, rising from its box to set things right when a bully begins to terrorize the other kids.

The film is interesting and very endearing, but is also very standard Pixar-fare. Not a bad thing at all, considering the general consistency and quality of films produced over the years by the studio. And Lou is no exception to that. It’s engaging and sweet, but it is also nothing ground-breaking.

Much less feel-good, much less full of those clear-cut morals of Lou, Revolting Rhymes is an adaption of Roald Dahl’s poems, featuring the nominated first episode. Having read these fairytales a long time ago, the film does measure up in some ways by wrapping up the story with a terrific ending and some very tongue-in-cheek story-telling. However, it still comes second to the charm of the original rhymes. It feels a bit lacking in some ways, but the characterization, the animation details, the picture-book perfect palette, and the satirical material it’s built upon prove to be still very appealing to watch.

When we move away from the obvious comedy of Revolting Rhymes, we have Garden Party, a pic that is much more subdued and sinister in its humour. It’s a gorgeous, hyper-realistic film, full of lush colours and gaudy scenery. And while Garden Party is a visual banquet, it’s an understated story of macabre undertones, an apprehensive underbelly to the stunning animation. Amphibians from the garden follow their instincts into an extravagant house. A fat toad feasts in a rotting kitchen on multi-coloured macarons. Two frogs find themselves underneath the plush covers of a bed in disarray, and countless croaking creatures lounge about, swimming in the murky depths of a pool. As night falls, the lights come up, the garden is lit with fountains, music, and a terrible twist.

There’s an interesting selection, from realistic CGI frogs to the organic pencil and pastel sketches of basketball players. And while I have my opinions, it’s difficult to predict a winner from the fact that Dear Basketball, Negative Space, Lou, Revolting Rhymes, and Garden Party are pretty much nothing alike.

So catch the Oscar Nominated Shorts at Michigan Theater and other select places before March 4th, and decide for yourself.

Student tickets are $8.

REVIEW: The Post

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

I’ll be honest: Going into The Post, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to enjoy it.

I love the 1960s and the 1970s for the sheer number and importance of things that happened then, so naturally I’m interested in the Pentagon Papers. I love writing and journalism, too, so naturally I’m interested in The Washington Post, too. But in the back of my mind, when I walked into the movie theatre, there was a small, nagging part of me that was eager to file this away quickly as another melodramatic period drama that would be fine, sure, and entertaining to watch, but not particularly revelatory or groundbreaking.

Of course, I was completely wrong.

One of the things that kept me hesitant toward the beginning of the film ended up being one of my favorite things about it: its protagonist. The Post tells the stories of numerous people involved in the release of the Pentagon Papers, but mostly of Katharine Graham, played by the always-illustrious Meryl Streep. Katharine is the unlikely owner and publisher of The Washington Post—having inherited the paper after her husband’s suicide—and she is heavily doubted, not only by others but by herself. For much of the first half of the movie or so, she socializes with people and tries to remain polite and unthreatening. The ultimate thrill of the movie comes from watching Katharine slowly come out of her shell and start asserting herself within her own company—and that’s saying something, for a movie so ripe with lawbreaking, espionage, and national drama.

Katharine’s relatability as a character is furthermore doubled by the film’s approach to gender inequality. The film is full of masterful shots that work to display the bizarreness of Katherine’s situation; in one scene, for instance, she walks through a crowd of women waiting outside while a meeting is in progress, and when she enters the meeting, everyone else there is a man. One of the most triumphant moments comes when she walks down the steps of the courthouse after successfully breaking the Pentagon Papers story, surrounded on all sides by a crowd of quiet, adoring women. These moments are not overstated or in-your-face at all; in fact, the conflict presented by the fact that Katharine is a woman, while obvious, is left largely unspoken, with only a couple of exceptions. This is very refreshing to see, because it both feels truer to real life and speaks to the film’s ability to present a conflict without needing to have all of the characters loudly call it out.

What ultimately makes this film great is its even-handed attention to both style and substance. The intelligent shots and scene-setting are bolstered by a quality screenplay, seamless directing from (of course) Steven Spielberg, and a magnificent soundtrack from (again, of course) John Williams. But The Post is also deeply interested in its characters and in what makes them complicated. Katharine is deeply uncertain, and she and her editor-in-chief, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), both face a complex dilemma in that they are personal friends with many of the people whose reputations would be ruined by the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Yet, even as these characters are forced to grow and to make difficult decisions, they still feel natural throughout; rather than doing cheap 360s, they mature within themselves in ways that are completely three-dimensional and thoroughly rendered.

The film leaves off on a particularly satisfying note: a winking hint at the Watergate scandal that followed soon after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. As a historical drama, The Post is so successful at revealing character, saying new things, and staying engaging, that when I left the theater, I couldn’t help wanting to see more. I wanted a new movie all about Watergate, a Post sequel. But I have a feeling you would have to track down all the same people in order to get it done right—after all, when you bring the likes of Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and John Williams into a room together, you can’t help but get something wonderful out of it.

PREVIEW: The Post

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

Journalism is an exciting, varied, and often under-appreciated field; recent attacks on “fake news” constitute a common example of the criticism under which journalists often fall. But journalism is really one of the most crucial and demanding fields out there, and the questions of ethics and courage are ones that journalists often have to face. The challenges undertaken by journalists came into the spotlight (sorry—I had to) in 2015 with Spotlight, and this year the subject is back with The Post.

The Post chronicles The Washington Post (of course) in their attempts to publish the Pentagon Papers. In addition to journalism, of course, I’m very interested in the Pentagon Papers, their political implications, and the ways in which they affected public perception of the U.S. Government. I’m excited to see how The Post handles these questions in a way that is both respectful of history and relevant in 2017.

The Post is currently playing at the Michigan Theatre.