Movie Review: See How They Run (2022, HBO Max Streaming)

Someone has murdered temperamental director Leo Köpenick. (Adrien Brody) Köpenick was trying to adapt Agatha Christie’s hit London stage play, the Mousetrap, onto the big screen. Was it the writer, Merwyn Cocker Norris (David Oyelowo) who was arguing with Köpenick over his script? Was it the married producer, John Woolf (Reece Sheersmiith) who was trying to cover up an affair with his assistant, Ann Saville (Pippa Bennett Warner) which Köpenick discovered? Was it Richard Attenborough, (Harris Dickenson) lead actor in the play, whose wife, Sheila Sim, (Pearl Chanda) may be having an affair with Köpenick. It’s up to Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and freshly minted Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) to find out whodunnit.

See How They Run is a good whodunnit, it could have been better if the who in the whodunnit was more prominent in the story. In that way, See How They Run falls into one of the biggest murder mystery cliches of them all, steering the audience towards characters with obvious motives, and revealing the killer as someone with a hidden motive that is never discussed. It’s also somewhat uncomfortable that some of the characters are real people and a fictional movie uses their real names and makes them murder suspects. Light comedic satire should not make the viewer feel uncomfortable. This one did. The spate of comedic murder mysteries is no doubt a result of the success of Knives Out. See How They Run could have been better, the script simply is not.

The acting is very good by some of the actors, not so good from others. Sam Rockwell plays a gruff, smug uninterested drunk detective. Worse off, there is no insight into how his mind works. Stoppard constantly berates Stalker, and doesn’t apologize for his character flaws until very late in the movie. That may be how the character is written, but Rockwell does nothing to make the character the least bit likeable or relatable. His British accent is passable. Saoirse Ronan saves this movie from a much worse fate. Her joyful, luminescent performance lifts this movie from so-so to eminently watchable. Her witty banter with Rockwell shows off her comedic timing in a way that she hasn’t shown in other films. Adrien Brody, who can be annoyingly whiny, is perfect as the hot-tempered American director in a cast of cool British cucumbers. David Oyelowo is also very good and funny as the persnickety perfectionist writer who tangles with Brody on the ending of the film within a film. He should have had a bigger role.

Tom George, the director of this film is a British television director, and his inexperience shows. The pacing lags. This film is a little over an hour and a half, and the reveal takes place about 20 minutes before the end of the film, which means there’s roughly 20 minutes of movie that doesn’t serve a purpose. There are a few visual flourishes, but not enough to add much to the story. Geoge gets some good performance, but Rockwell’s performance is flat and uninspiring, and George has to share the blame for that with the writer.

See How They Run: Runs out of material too soon.

Movie Review: Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a stoic 10 year-old boy living with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) in Germany during the rise of Nazism during World War II.  Jojo is so enamored with the Nazi mythology that he has an imaginary friend named Adolph. (Taika Watiti) Jojo happily trundles off to a Hitler youth camp where he’s immediately bullied for not killing a rabbit, like he’s instructed to.  He is tagged with the nickname Jojo Rabbit.  Jojo is also chided the kids call his dad a coward and a deserter, even though Jojo says his father is fighting in Italy.

Things get worse for Jojo when he is seriously injured in the camp, throwing a live grenade.  Jojo is hospitalized, and the two Nazis in charge, Captain Klensdorf (Sam Rockwell) and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson) and Jojo  is relegated to putting up Nazi propaganda posters on the streets near his home.  When Jojo comes home, he finds a secret room behind a wall, and a girl named Elsa (Thomassin McKenzie) hiding in that room.  Who is the girl, why is she hiding?

Jojo Rabbit is a very well-written story, for the most part.  It balances humor and drama, and the overarching theme of love overcoming hate is expressed quite forcefully and clearly.  Some of the characters are not as well-written as they could have been.  Captain Klensdorf is a little too sympathetic to Rosie and her family, and Rosie herself is a bit too carefree at a time when disobeying the Nazis and the war like she did, probably would have gotten her killed.  Having Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend might seem disturbing or bizarre, but it was actually a bold and creative piece of writing.  Remember, this story was written from the point of view of a 10 year old living in Nazi Germany, during WWII.  Of course Jojo is going to begin the story hero worshiping Hitler, but the fascinating aspect of the movie is watching Jojo’s attitudes evolve over time, that’s what makes the movie worth watching.  The ending is predictable, yet enjoyable.

The acting is also very good, and makes the movie better.   Taika Waititi does a great job of balancing satirizing Hitler, and showing the pure insanity of his beliefs.  As Hitler begins to realize he’s losing the war, and people turn away from his xenophobia, his conversations with Jojo, become more manic and desperate.  Waititi infuses his voice with both mania and desperation at the end of the film, no more an imaginary friend, but an enemy of mankind.  Roman Griffin Davis was also extraordinary in a difficult role, he had to be a gung ho member of the Hitler Youth, that is a difficult, role, and yet he makes Jojo a sympathetic character, which is amazing for a 12 year old actor.  Thomassin McKenzie does a good job as Elsa, he role packs an emotional wallop, and she delivers by underplaying the emotional scenes, not overplaying them.  Scarlet Johansson  does a very good job as Jojo’s somewhat mysterious mom.  One scene where she plays both Jojo’s mom and absentee dad is especially noteworthy.

The dreiction by Waititi is also very good, the pacing is brisk, the scenery is bright and colorful, and he gets great performances, especially from the kids, and that is not easy.  His writing and directing skills have greatly improved since What We Do In The Shadows, which seemed more like a college production, than anything else,

Jojo Rabbit:  A  hare raising film.

Movie Review: The Best of Enemies (2019)

In 1971, North Carolina schools were still segregated.  Civil Rights activist Ann Atwater (Taraji P Henson) was fighting to change that.  Local Klan leader, C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell) wants to maintain the status quo.  A fire at an all-black school causes Atwater to call for integration.  The dispute is taken into a judge, and Judge Leslie Hallford (Tim Ware) doesn’t settle the dispute himself, he asks state representative Bill Riddick (Babou Ceesay) to set up a charrette, a meeting for the opposite sides to get together and talk through their differences and hopefully desegregate the Durham school district. At first things don’t look too promising, Ellis tries to persuade the white members of the charrette that desegregation will ruin the school district.  Ann Atwater tries to persuade Ellis by helping his mentally challenged son get a better room in the institution where he stays.  Ellis attitude towards Atwater starts to soften, but no one knows how he will vote.  How does C.P Ellis vote?

The Best of Enemies gets credit for being informative.  I did not know that North Carolina schools were segregated  until 1971, and I did not know what a charrette was, so I did actually learn a couple of things while watching this movie.  But the audience should know the answer to if the schools have been desegregated, and that’s the problem with this film, the ending is known before a viewer watches on frame of this movie, and so how the filmmakers get to the climax is what’s important, and building to this climax was a dull , emotionless paint by numbers journey.  A movie like this is supposed to uplift  people like Hidden Figures did, but it didn’t.  The premise is a great one, but the execution is poor.  Watching this movie also made me wonder if people from opposite sides of an issue will ever work together again for the common good.  These days it’s too easy to have one’s own viewpoint affirmed, with the internet and social media and cable news, anyone can find something or someone to agree with, why talk to someone with different beliefs?

The acting was not what it should have been for a movie that told such an important story.   Taraji P. Henson yells through much of her performance, and so it’s a one note performance.  There was too little subtlety in the way she approached this role.  Sam Rockwell’s performance is too understated, other than the prolific use of the N-word, Rockwell goes through the motions. His laconic performance doesn’t help the story to move along.

Robin Bissell wrote and directed this movie, and the languid pacing of this film and the film’s length are just unbearable.  Why did this story take 2 hours and 15 minutes to tell?  It shouldn’t and that is the fault of Bissell, he let scenes go on too long and the movie itself is too long, tell a concise interesting story and people will watch.  Bissell is mostly a producer, this is the first time he’s directed a movie and it may be the last time.

The Best Of Enemies:  With Movies like This, Who Needs Enemas?

Movie Review: Vice (2018)

Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) was a ne’er do-well young man with a drinking problem who hung telephone wire for a living in Wyoming.  His girlfriend Lynne, (Amy Adams) was the one with the smarts and ambition in the family.  She threatened to leave Dick, unless he promised to stop drinking and get his act together, and so he did.  He won his first Congressional race in Wyoming, thanks largely to Lynne, and went on to work as an intern in the Nixon administration under Don Rumsfeld. (Steve Carell) Just before Watergate, Rumsfeld was named Ambassador to NATO, and Cheney went into the private sector.  Unscathed by Watergate, they returned to government in the Ford Administration, Rumsfeld as Chief of Staff, and then Secretary of Defense, and Cheney as Chief of Staff.  Cheney was then Defuse Secretary for HW Bush in 1988, and just when he thought he was done with public service, he got a fateful call from newly elected President George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) in 2001, who wanted him to be his Vice President. Lynne Cheney thinks he should refuse, as the vice presidency is a do-nothing job, but Cheney is seriously mulling over his answer.  Does he take the job?

Vice is an alternately funny, and painful retelling of the life of Richard B. Cheney.  What a viewer thinks  is funny, and what a viewer thinks is painful depends wholly on his/her political point of view. Vice posits a lot of theories about Dick Cheney.  And whether a viewer believes the theories about Cheney’s power and his control over the policies of the Bush administration, and whether one believes all those theories or dismisses them is again viewed from a political prism.  There were things that were amateurish and overdone, like a ubiquitous all-knowing narrator, who seemed to be everyone and no one all at once, like a Greek chorus telling viewers what the writers thought was important.  There were also phony end credits half-way through the movie, for comedic effect, all of which manage to undermine the serious subject matter.  There is one moment that stands out, however and that is Cheney’s final soliloquy, it expresses Cheney’s world view perfectly, and justifies, at least in his own mind, what he did and how he did it.  But the script can’t decide if it’s a tongue-in-cheek satire or a documentary style fictional drama, and that hurts this movie a lot.  If it had decided on a tone, and stuck to it, Vice would have been a much better movie.

The one aspect for this movie that is clear is Christian Bale’s absolute mastery of the role of Dick Cheney.  It is more than an impression, he gets the mannerisms the facial gesticulations, the voice, everything  is perfect, he doesn’t become Dick Cheney, he IS Dick Cheney.  Even the way Bale walks after he amasses all this power, astride the world like a Colossus, he’s the most powerful man in the world and he knows it. The writers also portray Dick Cheney as ruthlessly Machiavellian, and Bale portrays the cold-bloodedness with a Cheshire cat grin.  Amy Adams gives a surprisingly strong performance, Lynne Cheney is not a shrinking violet standing by her man, she actually shapes Dick Cheney to be the man she wants him to be, and Amy Adams sinks her teeth into this meaty role and makes Lynne Cheney a fierce human being. Kudos to the writers, and also Adams for making Lynne Cheney much more interesting than I ever thought she could be.

From the dizzying heights of Christian Bale and Amy Adams, the acting precipitously descends into ham handed mediocrity.  Steve Carell is most guilty of horrendously bad acting.  He plays Don Rumsfeld as as a completely unserious person, and I’ve watched enough press  conferences with Don Rumsfeld and he always struck me as a serious person, not someone who  is used for comedy relief.  Sam Rockwell  does perhaps the best impression of George W Bush I’ve seen so far,  but the writers give him nothing to work with the character is a  dim-witted, hallow party-boy, not interested in governing, and willing to hand over power to Cheney.  This is a total caricature of a man who was our president.  And Tyler Perry was just the first available black actor to play Colin Powell, he brought nothing to the role. Go back to putting on a dress Tyler Perry.

The direction is gimmicky visually, using Cheney’s heart problems as a metaphor, as in black hearted Cheney, the heart of all evil.  The omnipresent narrator is gimmicky too, and totally unnecessary.  Audiences can understand a narrative without it being spoon-fed to them.  The performances by Bale and Adams were outstanding, but Adam McKay, who also wrote the movie, turned this movie into much more of a comedy routine than it should have been.

Vice:  The story of Dick Cheney’s vice grip on power.

Movie Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (2017)

Mildred (Frances McDormand) works in a gift shop in Ebbing Missori. Her daughter Angela, (Katherine Newton) is raped and murdered, and 7 months after her murder, there has been no progress in finding Angela’s killer.  Desperate to keep the story in the public eye, Mildred pays 5,000 dollars to local ad man Red Welby (Caleb  Landry Jones) questioning the pace of the investigation, and the person heading the investigation, Chief Willoughby. (Woody Harrelson)  Most of the town is sympathetic with Mildred’s loss, but they also love and respect their chief. A local dentist, named Geoffrey (Jerry Winsett)  who doesn’t like the tries to take revenge on Mildred by drilling her tooth without and anesthetic, but Mildred  turns the drill on Geoffrey instead and turns the drill on Geoffrey’s thumb.  Willoughby’s deputy, Dixon (Sam Rockwell) is a rogue cop on the verge of losing his temper at any moment,  and he hates the billboards.  Mildred is put in jail, doe the drill incident, her friend Denise, (Amanda Warren) is put in jail for minor drug possession, things seem to be spiraling downward for Mildred, but then Chief Willoughby does something that shocks the entire town.  What does Willoughby do?  Does it move the investigation of Angela’s murder any closer to resolution?

Three Billboards is a really good movie, for the first hour.  The first hour pits a grieving mother against a small town police force and had it continued with that theme and that tone, it would have won the Best Picture Oscar. But the things that Chief Willoughby does, the things that Dixon does and the things that Mildred does and plans to do, drive the story off the rails and into the fertile imagination of a screenwriter.  In other words, it bears no resemblance to reality.  The ending is disastrous and maybe ever dangerous, the ending actually feeds into the pervasive nature of America’s gun culture.

Despite the faltering script, the acting is superb. Frances McDormand is one of the best actresses in Hollywood and she showed why.  Her raw emotions were on full display, anger, sorrow, pain, grit, Mildred will do anything to find out who killed her daughter.   This is a masterful performance, she absolutely deserved the Oscar.  Woody Harrelson gives another in a long line of great performances, he underplays Willoughby perfectly, he’s serene, but underneath, he’s a seething cauldron of emotion. Sam Rockwell plays Dixon a little too close to Wild Bill in The Green Mile.  I don’t know if he deserved an Oscar, but he got one.

There’s not much to say about the direction.  The director is Martin McDonagh, he also wrote this movie so he’s the guy to blame for the script as well as the slow pacing.  He gets good performances, but with this cast, doesn’t need much help.  McDonaugh also directed the headache-inducing In Bruges, so that doesn’t help him with me.

Three Billboards:  Don’t ad this to your collection.