nbcwendy-blog

[nbcwendy-blog]

Get Out

The ending of the movie Get Out is so stunning the audience in the Tysons Corner theater started cheering.   Yeah, it was that good.  But it was also our first chance to exhale.    Told brilliantly by writer, director Jordan Peele,  this  wonderfully creepy movie  takes the subject of racism and let's it slither around your chest like a python slowly squeezing you  for  an hour and 44 minutes until  you can't breath.  

It's also kinda funny.  

Jordan Peele is better known as half of the genius comedy team Key and Peele.    His comedic gifts are evident as he paves the road into this heart of darkness making some humorous pit stops along the way.  

Only a mastermind can make an audience cheer for the TSA.

Here's the premise.  We have a young, good looking couple who are clearly crazy about each other.   Chris, played by  Daniel Kaluuya,  is black.  His girlfriend Rose, played by Allison Williams,  is white.   As the movie opens they are preparing for a weekend trip in upstate New York  to meet her parents.   He asks, apprehensively,  if they know he's black.  Like a good eastern liberal she laughs it off saying her father would have voted for Obama a third time if he could.  

The first sign of trouble occurs en route when a deer hits their windshield.  The creature moaning in the forest is so unnerving  it sets your central nervous system on edge.  An encounter with a cop afterwards releases the first whiff of the  beast that will form  the foundation of this story.

Next we meet the parents and something just feels off.  They are nice and welcoming but the hair on the back of your neck starts to quiver a bit.   They're trying too hard.   The dad (Bradley Whitford) awkwardly uses urban slang when talking to Chris while mom (Catherine Keener) has a tendency to study Chris with the stillness of a spider waiting in her web.

Then there's the help.  A black housekeeper and a black groundskeeper who both act like they wandered over from the set of The Stepford Wives.  When Chris tries to engage them as a black brother or sister they don't respond to the familiar social code.  What's up with that?

Soon a garden party , a single tear on a black character's cheek  and a spoon stirring a cup of tea become as frightening as a noose hanging from a tree.   And now we know Chris is screwed.

Get Out is a modern tale of slavery that shows us a horrifying new way for rich white people to " possess" human beings.  

Aficianados of the horror genre will argue the Get Out dosn't ring all their bells.  But Peele calls his movie a "social thriller" .  Baby boomers will  see shades of Rod Serling's Night Gallery as Peele deftly takes us into a contemporary twilight zone.  

By relying on current events and the state of race relations in America today, Peele uses our own body of knowledge to scare the crap out of us.

(The call is coming from inside the house)

Shout outs to an ensemble cast that is fully invested in the mission.  Peele could not have done it without them.  And may we please see more of Daniel Kaluuya,  a British actor who has a wing span worthy of even bigger skies.

This is the first movie for Jordan Peele and his quill has electrified the zeitgeist of our times.  

As I write this... Get Out has reached 100 million in revenue in the first month.     A powerful endorsement for a movie made with the Hollywood equivalent of lunch money.    Proving once again that great storytelling is stilll the coin of the realm.

Get Out runs a dirty fingernail up your spine and makes you like it.  

It just might  become  that movie you see again and again.

[nbcwendy-blog]

Arrival

Arrival opens with a departure.  The worst kind.  A death. The worst kind.  A child. But did it happen?  Or is it going to happen? Arrival is a mind bending story that doesn't start to mess with your head until the last 15 minutes and then keeps messing with you long after the credits roll. It may leave you awake at night wondering:    So she didn't ...which means he wasn't ...which means that didn't....which means.....wait...what?

Let's start with the easy part.  The aliens.  Twelve giant black spherical "things" arrive one day in twelve countries  around the globe.  They don't quite land but hover a few feet off the ground.  This creates a mass hysteria that keeps cable news at full froth and prompts the military to assign their most cliche Colonel (Forrest Whitaker)  to land a helicopter in a backyard and  demand "Come with me!  Now!  You don't have time to pack a bag!" Sigh.   I have loved Forrest Whitaker since The Crying Game and I know he has to pay his mortgage but I was dismayed at the cartoon character he is required to play.  A hand puppet could have done the job.  Fortunately, he is not on screen a lot.  Bless his heart.

It is disconcerting whenever aliens land because we don't know if they are here to vaporize us or turn us into canned food for their pets.  The history of cinema tells us they never come here to solve our problems or help us lose weight.   So the military is suspicious of the sudden "arrival."  China wants to nuke them but we Americans want to talk.  When our negotiator asks the Giant Black Sphere, "what is your purpose here."    The aliens respond with a squeeking and moaning sound that reminds me of the time my 8-year-old niece decided to play the trombone.   Enter Amy Adams.

Adams plays Professor Louise Banks,  a linguist who is ordered into Forrest Whitaker's helicopter without an overnight bag and flown to Montana to learn the language of the Giant Black Sphere.  Now it gets interesting.     The Giant Black Sphere is quite impressive.   It's stillness as it just hovers there is kinda spooky.   Every 18 hours a door at the bottom opens allowing earthlings to go into a long anti-gravity Alice in Wonderland kind of passage where "up" is down and right is left .  Eventually  they arrive at a big window where two giant squids ( that could also pass for tree trunks uprooted from a storm) make a smokey Vegas style entrance.  

Louise communicates with the creatures using spoken and written words.  They respond with inky smoke emitted from their limbs that curls and swirls eventually forming circular images.   Louise spends much of the movie trying to decipher these images and their curly flourishes.  

Soon a vocabulary emerges  from  the smoke as an increasingly humorless Colonel Weber(Whitaker) yells  "we're running out of time!!"   China's premier is threatening to launch the big one, some crazy right wing talk show host is snarling, "fire one across their bow!"  and cable news STILL hasn't taken a commercial break.   It's that intense.

But Louise is forming a bond with the creatures and thinks they are misunderstood.  She fears she has fumbled the translation a bit.  Confused the word "weapon" with the word   "gift."   Kind of a biggie.   Like confusing bomb with popsicle.  But it may be too late.  Suddenly she starts traveling through time and she is saving the day by shuttling between the past and the future and the present.   This is where inky smoke started coming out of my ears and I  wasnt' sure if this movie was a weapon or a gift.

Maybe both.  

The mind bending ending asks us a philosophical question about the human condition.   If you knew , in advance,  how your life would turn out would you make different choices?    If we eliminate the sorrow and regret and longing and mistakes that are surely in our path would our lives be better?   Or would our lives be diminished because we did not experience the love that hurt so much when it was lost.    Everything that arrives in our lives will eventually depart....including our lives.  

Is this movie worth the couple of hours to arrive at this existential conclusion.  I don't know.   I'm not even sure THAT'S the conclusion.  But the movie left me feeling confused and disappointed.   Is it good?   Many people think it is.  I was never good in science so maybe i'm missing some genius of physics that makes the movie  "stellar!"  to borrow one reviewer's word.  One friend who liked it said it saw it twice and "got it" the second time.  If you have scant time to see movies these days I would skip this one for the much better Nocturnal Animals or La La Land or Moonlight.    Catch Arrival on Netflix so you can hit rewind as needed.

[nbcwendy-blog]

La La Land

"Here's to the ones who dream.  Foolish as they may seem."   Is a line from a haunting song that Emma Stone will sing in a stunning  showstopping moment towards the end of La La Land.  A moment  that could make you fall in love with this film after all.  Up until  then  the film has been charming and delightful and fun and different.    But with that one song it sweeps you off your feet and carries you, like Rhett Butler, up the stairs two at a time.

La La Land is an homage to the ones who dream.  To the scores who come to Tinseltown believing it's a real place.  Not knowing a dark matter of rejection and hopelessness pumps thru its veins like the cars that clog the freeways.  Yet,  this is the  land of illusion that gave us the greatest shows on earth.  The Hollywood musicals.  Those technicolor wonders that let people sing and dance their way to happy endings.  Director Damien Chazelle  magically resurrects that golden age in La La Land and allows us to teleport from our tedious and crude modern reality to that dreamy and romantic twilight world.

La La Land is a love story between Mia and Sebastian played by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.  She is an aspiring actress who endures  hilarious and awkward auditions uttering lines like, "No Jamal,  YOU be trippin."   As usual she is charming.

Sebastian is a jazz pianist who dreams of opening a jazz club that will pay homage to the roots of jazz and not the Kenny G. crap that sells these days.  He's a purist who rebels against the dreary  tide of consumerism.    Gosling plays him with a smirky quirky charm.

They meet cute, of course, and begin a magical courtship that involves some singing and dancing.    Nothing too complicated.  A little soft shoe and tap  and some ballroom bits.  This ain't Dancing with the Stars.  However, they do dance among the stars in one enchanted scene where they levitate into the celestial sphere at the Griffith Observatory.   At this point men will officially declare this a "chick flick" and head for Rogue One but I would encourage them to consider La La Land for this reason: Ryan Gosling on keyboards.  

Gosling bangs out some smokin hot jazz in a number of scenes that will keep the testosterone levels high.  And, yes,  he is actually playing the piano.   Go see it for that alone.  Lord have mercy!   He is crazy good.  Sensational.  Add a keylight bouncing off his sandy hair and you've got yourself a bonafide hearthrob.  

Emma Stone has a face for close ups and the confident swagger of an actor twice her age.  She is spunky and soulful and funny and sad.  She drives the narrative while Gosling adds twinkle and charm.   You can see why they fall in love.

But a third  character in this film is los Angeles.  The old gal has never looked so good. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren uses the natural lighting that infuses the City of Angels with a  hypnotic glow to create a dreamy landscape for love to unfurl.   While murals of the old Hollywood stars appear throughout the film reminding us of the epic time that has passed and the vast shadows they still cast.   How can today's stars ever shine so bright.

La La Land is a love song to those Hollywood ghosts who showed us  how to go big or go home. It starts with  a high voltage opening number on the Santa Monica Freeway during a traffic jam that has everyone spilling from their cars in a massive song and dance extravaganza  that seems to go on for miles and appears to be shot in one long take.   Cecil B. DeMille would be proud.  

But there are moments in the middle that do drag as the love story is forced to move the "boy gets girl to boy loses girl" narrative along. Then Emma Stone sings that beautiful  song kicking off the final  payoff that reinforces the beauty of this film and the inherent magic of this place. Chazelle's La La Land tells us that dreams are complicated in the hands of us humans.  And they can be ignited by two simple words.

What if.

[nbcwendy-blog]

Jackie

We've seen the Kennedy assassination a dozen times.   We've studied the trajectory of the bullets.   We've debated the sniper's motive and wondered if he acted alone.  But we have never been in the car,  in the backseat,  in the shoes of the First Lady on that brilliant sunny day when a bullet shattered her husband's head and her life.

Pablo Larrain's film,  “Jackie”,  gives us a searingly intimate play- by- play of an American icon who appears to have a gone a bit mad in the wake of this profound tragedy.  But the screenplay by Noah Oppenheim makes that madness appear to be  the logical reaction for a wife who has picked pieces of her husband's flesh out of her hair.

"Jackie" blows a hole into the mythology of Camelot by showing us how a stunned and grieving first lady  seized control of her husband's image in the bloody moments and surreal days after his death to pave the way for the mythology of Camelot .  She starts spinning Kennedy's image  just days  after the funeral  when she invites journalist  Theodore White ( Billy Crudyup)  to her home in Hyannis.  Its a quid pro quo,  he gets the interview but she gets to write it.   She is deliciously bossy as she dictates what will and will not be revealed.

This Jackie has come a long way from that famous televised tour of the White House one year earlier.   80 million people tuned in to that CBS broadcast to watch a nervous Jackie Kennedy show America how she had renovated the people's house.  (The director, Franklin J. Schaffner,  went on to direct Patton and Planet of the Apes.) The broadcast was riveting and so was she.    Kennedy would later say the president called it her "vanity project."

Maybe it is vanity that drives the grieving Jackie in the days after the assassination.   How does she insure that Kennedy's brief time on stage, and hers,  can live on forever.   First, he must be buried like a king.

This is where the opera gloves come off.

Jackie Kennedy  insists on a full funeral procession through the streets of Washington with dignitaries walking behind the casket.   She draws on Lincoln's cortege for inspiration and is defiant when Lyndon Johnson's staff suggest to her that it's a bit much for a man who barely served one term in office and met his demise in such an unseemly way.     Then there's the question of security.   How do you protect all the heads of state in a country where a President and his accused have both been assassinated in a matter of days.  The latter on live television.  

But this once demur first lady is a force of nature now.   Her outrage and sorrow unleashed in fits of demands.  And it is satisfying to see the Johnson administration squirm  as it tries to take the stage while Mrs. Kennedy  is raging in the wings. .

Natalie Portman expertly removes the veil of perfection from Jackie and shows us a woman who is  trapped in a twilight world of crushing pain.  Her eyes often glazed by the pills she takes to get through the day.   But  the madness flows freely at night  in the privacy of the family quarters.  There she floats around like a ghost dressed in her designer gowns.  Haunting the rooms.   A sad final lap as this world disappears in the mist.  

Director Pablo Larrain reminds us that our icons are humans.  They grieve just like us,  maybe worse,  because they cannot show their pain.   Jackie Kennedy was credited with keeping the country together and showing us how to mourn as she bore her suffering with grace and dignity.   Cinematographer Stephane Fontaine's camera catches her face as the wind lifts her veil during the procession.   It is one of the many visual grace notes in the film.

Editor Sebastian Sepulveda masterfully cuts between the actual funeral footage and the fictional film.  He does the same with the White House Tour.  And while Natalie Portman does not have the striking beauty of Jackie Kennedy she nails her breathy voice.  It is so well executed you wonder if she is lip- syncing over the original news footage.  By the way,  that IS the voice of CBS newsman Charles Collingwood coming out of the actor who plays him in the film.

The film, “Jackie”,  reminds us how dazzling the Kennedys appeared to be and how easy it was to buy into to the idea of Camelot. The style, the glamour, the children playing under the president's desk.  The robust youthfulness  captured our imaginations and reflected the American ideal.   But Larrain never allows us, or Jackie,  to linger there.   He yanks us back to that November day.  He shows us the  viseral aftermath of a bullet going through a brain and what remains on the wife sitting nearby.  He also addresses the queston of why Jackie reached over the back of the car after the second shot was fired.  You may not like the answer.

John F. Kennedy was president of this nation for two years, ten months and two days.  But Jackie Kennedy  turned that brief  moment into a never ending fairy tale.   ( Richard Burton deserves some credit as well. )   This movie and the ensemble that bring it to the screen allow us to enjoy the wonder of it all once again.   It is a voyeuristic journey into the lives of the people we erect as our gods.  And the myths we embrace that keep them from falling too heavily to earth.

[nbcwendy-blog]

Manchester by the Sea

Manchester By the Sea feels like an elegy.  Someone or something is dead.   We don't know.   But as we watch a maintenance man unstop a toilet and take out the trash in the opening scene,   his actions are underscored by a chilling and ever rising  chorus setting a tone that can only be associated with the damned.    It pierces the mundane action  and signals that something unholy has transpired.   And  now, as the curtain rises,  we are joining  the leading man in Hell.

This is the story of Lee Chandler played with somber intensity by Casey Affleck.   Ben Affleck's younger brother.   Chandler is a sullen and sunken man with lifeless blue eyes who is going through the motions of his life.  And it's not much of a life.   He's a janitor at a Boston apartment complex.  But his inscrutable sadness is catnip to the lady tenants who  provide some comically absurd flashes in the midst of this funereal opening.

Soon Chandler  receives word that his beloved older brother has died of heart failure requiring him to return to  his hometown of Manchester by the Sea.  

As he travels home we are treated to flashbacks that start to fill in the backstory of our unhappy guy.   We learn that this is his tribal land.  A solid and tight knit working class community that feels like one big extended family.    Irish in their communal bonds. Affectionate but tough.   People forged by rough weather and a devotion to the sea.  

We see a different Chandler as we look back on his previous years in Manchester by the Sea.   . We see Chandler had a wife, (an excellent Michelle Williams) and three kids  We see what Chandler was like when he was truly living.   And we also get a hint that it was here that something happened  that tossed our man into the deep. And as he arrives home we see that this unspoken event still haunts the clan.

Chandler learns that his brother has made him guardian of his 16 year old son, Patrick.   A smart and modern kid played with subtle wit and great confidence by  Lucas Hedges.   But despite his clear affection for his nephew,   Chandler rejects the request.   Flat out refuses  with such intensity we start to see the cracks in the cellar door.   You know that  the awful  thing hiding in the darkness  is about to climb the stairs.

Casey Affleck gets to display some impressive acting chops with this role.  He has a stoic countenance that could become boring in the hands of a lesser artist.  Like Brando,  one senses something coiled within him.  An animal rage that dare not be provoked.  The longer he stays in this town the more his surface ripples with the tension building below.    

There is some welcomed sunlight piercing these overcast skies thanks to Lucas Hedges as the nephew.  He is an ingenious young fellow who knows how to game the system so he can gain entry into a girls bedroom while under her mother's watchful eye.    He is also quite good at needling his dour uncle who seems to forget that this child just lost his father.

Soon the most important flashback appears.     We see the  breathtaking tragedy that condemned Chandler  to this undertow and we are reminded that sometimes life is worse than death.  

Director Kenneth Lonergan, who also wrote the screenplay ,  creates  a compelling meditation on sorrow without redemption. The operatic soundtrack adds more  weight to this already heavy film,   It can be a bit much.    But Manchester by the Sea  has moments of stunning artistry as it plumbs the interior of everyday people who are forced to shoulder Herculean sorrow and still find the strength to keep breathing. When Chandler and his ex-wife meet accidentally on the street what unfolds is so shockingly real and intimate and sad it places a knot in one's chest that will remain for days.

This film clocks in at two hours and 17 minutes.  And it feels like three. 

The narrative becomes a bit  repetitive.  Do we really need ANOTHER bar fight to show our man's inner rage?   What should I discern from that long shot of geese flying  against a bleak New England sky?   Two hours in  I wanted to shout out "Kenny land the plane!"

So,  get the jumbo crate of popcorn and hit the head during the previews.    Manchester by the Sea is a long days journey into night.

[nbcwendy-blog]

Nocturnal Animals

    From the beginning of Nocturnal Animals,  Tom Ford starts to test our ability to handle discomfort.  But nothing,  not even the sight of naked  obese  women  gyrating on stage during the opening credits,  will prepare us for what is to come.      This is Ford's second film  and it  has the same designers touch that he brought to A Single Man.    But instead of a gay man burdened with grief and thoughts of suicide... Nocturnal Animals deals with a wronged ex- husband (Jake Gyllenhaal)  exacting a diabolically clever revenge on his ex-wife  played by Amy Adams.        We meet Susan at the opening of a show at her ultra cool L.A. gallery.   Looming over her are  giant screens of the aforementioned obese women dancing in the nude.  Their excessive flesh swinging in slow motion as they stare into the camera daring you to look away. It is shockingly audacious.          Susan's world could use a shock.   She is living a life of high art with no soul or heartbeat.  Her gorgeous modern home filled with equally gorgeous staff is as warm as an Architectural Digest layout.   She enters thru it's palace gates into a remote world of muted colors and designer ennui.  Ford and his cinematographer Seamus McGarvey engulf her in neo- noir lighting.  The shadows  look menacing and with the swelling orchestral score you half expect her to throw herself off a cliff.   Apparently the good life can be that bad.           We learn that Susan is in a dead second marriage and has been pondering her first husband lately.   Eddie was  the young writer she married against the wishes of her wealthy privileged mother played by Laura Linney ( in a cameo that is heartbreakingly brief. )        Now Susan  is comparing that life to the one she inhabits now .  And  she is  burdened by an unspecified betrayal of that sweet man. She admits what she did to him was horrible.          Suddenly that first husband sends her his latest book which is dedicated to her.    As she opens its pages the story  comes to life and we are now drawn into a movie within a movie.           Here Ford breaks with the muted colors and  stillness of Susan's world and takes us into the black night and high sun of  Texas.   Jake Gyllenhaal,  now portraying the husband in the book,  is on a road trip to west  Texas with his wife and teenage daughter.  A trip that will soon force them to encounter  some psychopathic rednecks along the way.            What follows is  a torturous scene of escalating violence that raises the bar on cinematic terror.  It is excrutiating to sit thru it.  But like the gyrating women....it is riveting and tests your endurance for pain..         The only relief we get in this western nightmare is the appearance of Michael Shannon as the hard bitten sheriff who knows that justice in these parts requires the ethics of a rattlesnake.  He's worth the price of admission.   As is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a British actor playing one of the psychopaths.  He shows us a thing or two about the interior landscape of an American miscreant.           If you are the type of movie-goer who needs a light hearted escape when you enter a theater then Nocturnal Animals may not be for you.  But  give it a try.  This may be the perfect movie to broaden your cinematic vistas.              Ford opens his designer's toolbox to create a visually compelling tale of revenge.  His color and texture and shocking imagery will  ensnare you.   As will his terrific ensemble cast creating memorable characters that keep the shifting narrative moving forward on its collision course.  You can already hear the Oscar buzz for Gyllenhaal.                Nocturnal Animals tells us that revenge is a dish best served on a designer plate.  It may also keep you up at night.