Tag: movies

Movie review: The Brutalist

Adrien Brody

The Brutalist was the last of the Best Picture films still playing at the Spectrum Theatre that I had not seen. So, I attended the 12:15 matinee with eight others during the week before the Oscars. (There was no way I would see a three-and-a-half-hour movie at 6:50 p.m.) 

I really liked the opening and closing credits, which had the stationary text with the camera’s focus moving.

The first part was “The Enigma of Arrival,” a fictional account of a Hungarian immigrant named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who comes to the United States.  He stays with a cousin from back home (Alessandro Nivola) who has Americanized himself. That works for a while until a seeming debacle.

Ultimately, though, he gets a commission from American tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers Tóth’s genius. His beloved wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) finally joins him, unlike when he last saw her. 

I appreciated the intense portrayal of the immigrant experience, including their credentials from their previous country that were not applicable in the US. The movie showed how people can be marginalized and fall into traps of drugs and other problems because of their difficult situations.

Let’s take a break

Then there was a 15-minute intermission. I haven’t been to a movie with an intermission since Reds in 1981, and like that film, I thought the first half of the movie was far more substantial than the second. 

Even some critics who liked the film, 93% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, noted that “The Hardcore of Beauty 1953–1960” was a lesser part. “If The Brutalist stopped after the intermission, it would be a near-perfect film, an immigrant story in the vein of The Godfather Part II”. Russ Simmons of Kansas City radio station: “The film’s second half meanders and leaves us with dangling plot threads.”

A negative review by Brian Viner (Daily Mail UK): “There are many impressive things about this film, not least the acting, but for me it too often loses its narrative grip in the second act, veering off on tangents that feel unnecessary, distracting and self-indulgent.” Audiences were 80% positive. 

Afterwards, another patron asked me what I thought of the film.  I said I liked it but didn’t love it. He had been in situations where he was an artist with a patron, and he saw first-hand how the patron could try to take over the artist’s whole life, which he related to immensely. I can see that.

Movie review: I’m Still Here

Ainda Estou Aqui 

Of all the movies nominated for best picture, the film I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui  in Portuguese) is the one I knew the least about when I went to the Spectrum Theater in late February to see it. I couldn’t even remember the name, saying to the ticket seller, “It’s the, uh, Brazilian film,” and they knew what I meant.

In 1971, “Brazil faces the tightening grip of a military dictatorship.” You first get a sense of this with a roadway police stop. Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and Rubens (Selton Mell) are living a reasonably comfortable upper-middle-class life. Eunice and Rubens clearly adore each other. They and their five children get along as well as a large family can. Rubens was in the federal legislature in the past but is long retired.

First, Rubens, then Eunice, and briefly, even one of their daughters are taken away and interrogated.  This turns their world upside down, “The film is based on Marcelo Ruben Pavia’s biographical book and tells a true story that helped reconstruct an important part of Brazil’s hidden history.” This true story is just one of many families disrupted by the government. 

Awards

The film won the Oscar for Best International Film. It was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture—I preferred it to Anora, FWIW—and Torres was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. She won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture—Drama, and justifiably so. Fernanda Montenegro played the older Eunice Paiva in the film; she is the mother of Fernanda Torres.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it received 97% positive reviews from critics and audiences. And it did better box office in the UK than expected.  

David Sims of The Atlantic notes correctly, “By highlighting Eunice’s role as a parent, [director Walter] Salles pushes viewers toward considering the mundanity of living under a dictatorship — and the gnawing nightmare of lacking control in the face of obvious evil.” A strong film. 

Movie review: Flow

from Latvia

The star of the movie Flow is a solitary black or dark gray cat. It’s a feline in an animated feature, but it isn’t a cartoon cat, so it speaks only to mew and doesn’t walk on its hind legs. It sleeps on a human bed in a house surrounded by cat sculptures.

Humans must have existed at some point, but none appear in this film. Whatever happened to this world is getting worse, as the cat has to run to higher ground to stay above the flooding.

Eventually, a boat floats by and soon holds a lemur, a capybara, a heron, and the cat. How do these nonanthropomorphized creatures communicate enough to work together to survive? They must find a safe space. Oh, and there is a pack of dogs nearby.

Director Gints Zibalodis from Latvia co-wrote the script with Matiss Kaza, co-wrote the engaging music with Rihards Zalupe, and is listed as the movie’s editor, cinematographer, and art director. I particularly loved the painted aspect of the creature, especially the primary canine.

Future?

Even more than The Wild Robot, which I also liked, Flow is a credible futuristic tale. The reviews were almost universally positive, 97% with the critics and 98% with the audiences. One reviewer wrote: Flow is a spirited and wild film experience that must be experienced and appreciated for the ground-breaking, profound feat of excellence that it is. This writer was moved, engaged, and enthralled by its scope, beauty, and heart. An inspiring ode to wildlife and its resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.”

A friend of my wife said it was a meditative film, which I can relate to. We saw Flow at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany at a mid-January matinee. Thee were only six of us there, and two left when they realized they were in the wrong theater. 

Movie review: A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan

My wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see A Complete Unknown at a Saturday matinee in late December. I asked the cashier whether people approached them and sang the title. They said a few did because they were trying to remember the film’s name; rather than saying, “Oh, the Dylan film,” they dug up the line from Like a Rolling Stone. The theater was quite full, with most patrons appearing to be eligible for Social Security.

It isn’t easy to analyze the film without the big caveats that many have already shared about the chronology and veracity of what happened to Bob Dylan between 1961 and 1965.  Characters are combined, and events happen in different order. What DID Pete Seeger feel about Dylan “going electric”? (Pete has long suggested that the distorted sound, not the volume, bothered him.)

All I can do is evaluate the film I saw. I liked it quite a bit, and my wife, who is a bit younger than me and not as immersed in early 1960s folk/pop music culture, also enjoyed it.

Timothée Chalamet did a credible job as Dylan or an element of Dylan. The movie’s Dylan seems to have been consistently oblique about his upbringing. His first girlfriend in New York City, Sylvie (Elle Fanning), complained that he’d never discussed it. Dylan pointed out that we’re all reinventing ourselves. 

So it was with the real Bob, from his white face paint in the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 to his religious era in the late 1970s and beyond.

Edward Norton did a wonderful job as Pete Seeger. Boyd Harrison was an adequate Johnny Cash, more with the swagger than the voice. Monica Barbaro was a pretty good Joan Baez; I think, in some ways, she had the hardest job of all since, to my ear, Joan’s is wonderfully specific.

A fan

I’m a big fan of these artists. I have a lot of Dylan, as well as several albums of Dylan covers, including this one. To be honest, seeing him in 2008 was rather unsatisfying.

Joan’s Best of Joan Baez album on Vanguard in the early ’60s was pivotal in my understanding of folk music. My father, sister Leslie, and I sag So Soon In The Morning from that album.  I saw her sing at the 1998 Newport Folk Festival. Recommend: the documentary I Am A Noise. About A Complete Unknown, she said that she didn’t have to see the film: “I lived it.”

My father owned the Pete Seeger album We Shall Overcome, Live from Carnegie Hall (1963). It got played a lot and had a huge effect on my father. I saw Pete sing in person probably three dozen times, mostly in the Mid-Hudson. One day, he performed at anti-war rallies in New Paltz and Kingston, NY.  I even spoke to him once at an anti-Springboks demonstration in September 1981 in Albany.

While I watched his ABC TV shows in the 1960s and 1970s, I rediscovered Johnny Cash in the mid-1990s through his American Recordings.

Movie review: Wicked

Ozian authoritarianism

For my wife’s and my Tuesday date night in mid-December, we went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see the movie Wicked. I had seen the touring show of the Broadway play a dozen years earlier and liked it quite a bit. I also read the book and was not as enthusiastic about it.

However, the novel is important as it creates a reimagining of the L. Frank Baum books, with a certain amount of homage to the 1939 movie. The character we knew as the Wicked Witch of the West has been named Elphaba, a direct homage to Baum’s initials. That the protagonist is not inherently evil is an interesting concept. 

The movie leans into both the book and the Broadway show. As described by Alex Mell-Taylor here: “The book chronicles her life as she struggles against the authoritarian Wizard of Oz, a fascistic figure who scapegoats entire classes of people to stay in power, including, eventually, Elphaba herself.

“It’s ultimately a tragic tale about how the winners of history can turn fighters for justice into villains.

“The musical never abandoned this theme, but it does become less prominent, with the emotional core switching to Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship and the rise of Ozian authoritarianism becoming more of a B-plot. While Maguire’s original retelling had some flashy, risque elements, it’s undoubtedly more substantive than the musical. A large part of the book is about Elphaba’s activism — something the musical only briefly touches upon.

This AND That

“The movie is a hybrid of these two visions. It follows the structure of the musical but uses visuals to heighten the authoritarian (arguably fascist) aesthetic that first came from the book. We are aware of Ozian’s discriminatory nature throughout the film in a way that feels much more consequential than a simple B-plot.”

This explains, if not necessarily justifies, the movie’s length—or, more correctly, the movies. Wicked: For Good will be released in November 2025.  

I liked the first movie well enough. As enemies turned friends, Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Ariana Grande-Butera (Galinda) gave strong performances. Jeff Goldblum, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Michelle Yeoh, as Madame Morrible, and Jonathan Bailey, as the eye candy Fiyero, were also very good. 

Still, the movie’s length wore me down. Somebody (Roger Ebert?) suggested that a movie could be too long at 90 minutes and too short at 4 hours. This movie, which was about 2:45, had many elements that I enjoyed, including most of the music, but somehow, I was a little disappointed.

The movie received an 88% positive critics’ rating and 95% from audiences.  As Keith Garlingrton noted: “’Wicked’ doesn’t quite dazzle the way it wants to. It’s an uneven and unwieldy production.” It felt like an oversized truck careening down a narrow highway when you worry that the payload will tip over.

Then there’s the “you have to see the next episode” aspect. I experienced this with Marvel movies, so I and many others were not rushing to see the later outings after Avengers: Endgame. I will probably see Wicked For Good, but it will make me cranky. 

A few articles

‘Wicked’ and Hollywood’s Bumpy Road to Oz. Jon M. Chu’s musical… is defying gravity at the box office — but it was a winding yellow-brick road of Hollywood adaptations to get here from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

‘Wicked’ Easter Eggs for Your Second (or Third) Watch. Two of the elements were obvious to me. “The title card for Wicked also uses the same font as the title card for The Wizard of Oz... Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the roles of Elphaba and Glinda, respectively, in the Wicked Broadway stage musical,” have a number.

Shawn Levy (Deadpool & Wolverine) and Jon M. Chu (Wicked) — Directors on Directors

Cynthia Erivo Reveals She Co-Wrote an Original Song for Elphaba in ‘Wicked: For Good.’  ‘Wicked: For Good’: Here’s What We Know About Part 2.

Ramblin' with Roger
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