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Anya Taylor-Joy, Carey Mulligan, FOX19, Harvey Weinstein, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Fiennes, She Said, The Menu, tt stern-enzi, Zoe Kazan
Doubling back to a couple of older releases
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
03 Saturday Dec 2022
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Anya Taylor-Joy, Carey Mulligan, FOX19, Harvey Weinstein, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Fiennes, She Said, The Menu, tt stern-enzi, Zoe Kazan
Doubling back to a couple of older releases
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
15 Monday Mar 2021
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Academy Awards, Another Round, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Picture, Carey Mulligan, Chadwick Boseman, Chloe Zhao, FOX19, Nomadland, One Night in Miami, Regina King, Riz Ahmed, tt stern-enzi, Viola Davis
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
24 Thursday Dec 2020
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
06 Tuesday Nov 2018
I have come to appreciate a particular brand of literary-to-film adaptation, which I didn’t realize until I reached the end of Paul Dano’s new film Wildlife, based on Richard Ford’s 1990 novel of the same name. It was the first screening I attended at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival; a spot that, in recent years, has gone to other signature titles like Luca Guadagnino’s luscious translation of André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (from 2017) or writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s original drama Manchester By The Sea(from 2016), which fully engaged the power of descriptive language.
The spoken word matters and we remember the dramatic arc of key performances in these films, but the thing that stays with me — the haunting refrains in each instance — comes more from how the filmmakers composed moving frames that could be read like novels.
At first glance, this would seem even more impressive in the case of Dano, a first-time cowriter (with Zoe Kazan) and director who is better known as an actor — he went toe-to-toe with Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood and played the younger version of Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy — until you consider the fact that Dano has worked under the tutelage of filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff), and Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave). It is obvious that Dano was doing more than merely taking direction; he was also absorbing how each filmmaker navigated the craft of storytelling.
No matter how broad the scale of the production, a meaningful degree of intimacy must exist, not only between the characters onscreen, but with audiences as they seek ways to be immersed in the scenes.
In Wildlife, the stripped-down narrative shows a young boy, Joe Brinson (Ed Oxenbould), quietly observe the gradual dissolution of his parent’s marriage. His father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), is an uncompromising and principled man of meager means, but his young son can still easily look up to and imagine emulating him. His mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), is more practical and driven. Set in 1960s’ Montana, she’s handcuffed by social conventions that define the role of women both in families and as potential breadwinners. When Jerry loses his job and sees no other option than to sign up to fight wild fires, the dangerous undertaking separates him from his family for weeks at a time. Jeanette stays home and cuts as many corners as possible until she feels she has no other choice but to embark on an affair with her boss (Bill Camp), an opportunistic and paternalistic figure.
It is fair to say that audiences will know early on where this story is headed, but Dano’s expert execution makes the journey a diverting (and at times disturbing) experience. The performances, starting with Mulligan’s Jeanette, capture the escalating desperation of people caught up in social and cultural boxes that are on the verge of squeezing the life out of them. Everyone is fighting and at odds with not only each other, but also with themselves and the choices they have made.
On a deeper level, Wildlife reminds me of Revolutionary Road, the 2008 Sam Mendes film based on a Richard Yates novel which featured Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet and Michael Shannon. Shannon earned an Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actor for his work, and the film also got nods for Art Direction and Costume Design. I find the latter distinctions more telling because they speak to how visual composition is analogous to what a gifted writer can do with words. Authors generate sensory details that place us in a time and location that might otherwise be completely unfamiliar to us, but they make it well known.
Filmmakers who convert narratives from the page to the screen operate in similar modes. That notion is apparent in Wildlife as Dano provides viewers with textural cues that are capable of augmenting the work of his cast. We are treated to moments of watching Jerry fight wild fires of unbridled majesty and destructive impact; this contrasts with the empty spaces of the Brinson household, which lets us know this place is no home for Jerry, Jeanette or Joe. Dano shows rather than tells us these things — as only a master storyteller can. (Opens Friday) (PG-13) Grade: A
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
10 Tuesday Nov 2015
By T.T. Stern-Enzi
Rating: PG-13 Grade: B
Following the preview audience screening of “Suffragette” I attended, I found myself driving around town, between appointments with an iTunes playlist cued to shuffle, and two songs that on the surface would seem to have very little in common with director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s film triggered a very weird and intriguing association for me, about what “Suffragette” could have been.
I may have been prejudiced to the narrative, in that it presents the very real-life drama of a collection of women, fed up with second-class status, giving voice to their frustrations, and ultimately resorting to calculated acts of aggression when the patriarchal system ignores their more non-violent calls for the right to vote and equal pay, through the perspective of a character named Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) who is, at best, a composite of women suffering under the sometimes mild (and other times abusively cruel) dictatorship of men. The problem with Maud is that, at worst, she is a wholly fictitious creation, when she needn’t have been.
“Suffragette” stumbles out of the gate with a plea for women to come forward, to share their personal stories of abuse and/or general (unthinking) mistreatment at the hands of the system. It should not have been difficult to find testaments from real women, the real Maud Watts out there, to serve as the basis for Mulligan’s character, even finding ties to one such Everywoman that could have been linked to the larger, more significant figures in the movement like Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a glorified cameo seeking to gain traction by the very fact of enlisting Streep).
My iTunes double play kicked off with the track “Dilly Dally” from the Brooklyn Funk Essentials, a jazz-infused hip-hop collective settling into a deeply contemplative Rastafarian groove and spoken-word lamentation about the daily struggles of living on the marginalized edges of society. “I rise each day/to yet another shock/from this alarm clock culture,” the lyric begins, intoning a litany of indignities quietly accepted by the working class, the working poor and the dispossessed without a voice or vote in society.
Although this thoroughly modern song is set in America (New York), it is not hard to draw comparisons to London’s East End, a century ago, and its women like Maud Watts toiling away in insufferable conditions in laundries. Women who watched silently as their men, barely treated better themselves, held their heads high and scoffed at the notion that women should be allowed to vote. Those women had every reason to wonder about the elusive vote, much like the narrator of “Dilly Dally” who concludes, “It’s hard to love the fruit/when I never get to climb the tree.”
“Much has changed” is a familiar refrain from those in society who have never had to live without privilege, for whatever reason. Much has changed, they say, expecting the downtrodden to gratefully agree, to offer thanks for table scraps.
That second completely different track which followed was “Change it All” from the R&B singer Goapele. More melancholy than the darker and quite cynical “Dilly Dally,” there is still a role-call of societal ills—fewer public libraries, teachers working for free, small businesses closing—“because there’s not enough,” Goapele tells us. She’s asking us if we see the state of things; she’s begging us to open our eyes to see it, to start sorting it out, because there are those of us who live in comfort, capable of doing something about the situation. We don’t have to sit around, “waiting, restlessly, for the words to a song, to change it all.”
“Suffragette” captured a world before contemporary luxury was more widespread, before changing laws, before advances in science made it so that we weren’t merely fighting to stay alive in the face of disease and common ailments, before people sat around imagining that the words of a song could make a difference or before a critic, like myself, could bemoan the idea that a fictional composite shouldn’t have to represent a generation of real women.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, CityPaper Archives
19 Tuesday May 2015
Posted Black Eye
in19 Tuesday May 2015
Posted Black Eye, CityPaper Archives
inBy T.T. Stern-Enzi
Rating: PG-13, Grade: A
Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) certainly has her wits about her; at least that sounds like something that might have been said of the character between the days when Thomas Hardy conceived her (“Far From the Madding Crowd” was published in 1874) and today. Such a turn of phrase feels, to modern ears, like it was invented expressly for Everdene, especially as portrayed by Mulligan in this adaptation of “Far From the Madding Crowd” from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg who, as a founding member of the Dogme95 collective with Lars von Trier, burst onto the scene with “The Celebration” in 1998. Vinterberg may have advanced past the, well, dogmatic filmmaking strictures of the group, but his affinity for quiet and fiercely independent protagonists (and the performers playing them) hasn’t fallen by the wayside.
Everdene has much in common with Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), the teacher at the center of Vinterberg’s previous film, “The Hunt,” which finds the dedicated teacher at the mercy of a mad and quite bloodthirsty crowd, a tight-knit community that suspects him of being a child molester after the daughter of one of his close friends levels an accusation against him. Lucas, a sensitive soul and good man, understands, from a strictly primal perspective, how the community feels – the desire to protect the girl, to even go to great lengths to mete out their own brand of justice – but he knows, in his heart, that he is innocent, and thus has no choice other than to stand up to them. He is fighting an unspoken communal social order that is out for blood.
While Everdene’s battle is far less dire, in its own way, it too is about bucking an entrenched social order and standing alone. Everdene is an educated woman, uncommon enough for her day and age, but she also dares to see herself existing outside the restrictive social norms. Why settle, she imagines, for a shepherd, even one as handsome and solid as Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), who offers his hand in marriage along with his meager stake in the land he works and his willingness to do whatever it takes to make her happy?
She respectfully declines, and soon after inherits land and an estate that guarantees her the freedom to live the kind of independent life she imagines, far from the obligations to marry for security and status. Everdene blazes ahead, seizing command of the running of the estate, hiring Oak – after he suffers a fall from the precarious sense of stability he once enjoyed – fending off the advances of another potential suitor, in the form of country aristocrat William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), a suitable older man seeking to form an alliance of convenience and comfort between them, all before succumbing to the superficial charms of Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), a dashing soldier skilled with a rapier but little else.
The narrative goes to great lengths to establish Everdene’s intelligence and good judgment, only to have her throw it all away on what amounts to a dalliance. It is likely that Hardy’s book feels overly plotted and contrived, setting Everdene up as a patsy to her uncontrollable female urges.
What I like about Vinterberg’s film, and in particular Mulligan’s performance is the subtle acknowledgement of real complexity in this character. She is not dominated by whim or whimsy. Mulligan shows us just how difficult it might have been to take such a stand, and Everdene’s conviction. That she falters is no crime or severe flaw in her character; instead, the focus rightly becomes how she rights herself and the situation. Mulligan leaves no room for doubt that Everdene will land on her feet and serve as an example for others intent on bucking the prevailing trends and the mad crowds arrayed against them.