Movie critic, TT Stern-Enzi, previews ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and ‘Jessica Jones’ new releases in theaters and on Netflix, respectively.
Source: Movie Reviews with TT Stern-Enzi
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09 Friday Mar 2018
Movie critic, TT Stern-Enzi, previews ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and ‘Jessica Jones’ new releases in theaters and on Netflix, respectively.
Source: Movie Reviews with TT Stern-Enzi
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Gigs
07 Wednesday Mar 2018
We’ve come to the end of the road, and unlike Boyz II Men, I’m so ready to let go. It happens around the same time every year as the prestige film season coverage comes to a close with the Academy Awards, and we seem to have been talking about the same set of films and performances since late August or early September (around the time of the major trifecta of film festivals in Telluride, Venice and Toronto). What more can be said?
At the Academy Awards ceremonies Sunday night, Oscars in the top categories went to The Shape of Water for Best Picture and Best Director (and Best Original Score and Production Design); Darkest Hour’s Gary Oldman for Best Actor; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s Frances McDormand for Best Actress and Sam Rockwell for Best Supporting Actor; I Tonya’s Allison Janney for Best Supporting Actress; Call Me By Your Name for Best Adapted Screenplay; Get Out for Best Original Screenplay; and Coco for Best Animated Feature.
But in terms of crafting the final feature narrative of the awards season, it’s worth mentioning Get Out’s double wins at Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards (for Best Director and Best Film), which some were willing to hail as an emerging trend or a last possible gasp for an upset for Best Picture at the Oscars. The last four Independent Spirit Awards winners resulted in Best Picture honors for 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, Spotlight and Moonlight, so precedent watchers were taking notice.
And then, lo and behold, the film’s creator Jordan Peele became the first African-American to earn the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. While this wasn’t a complete surprise, since Peele received the same distinction from the Writers Guild, there was an assumption that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s writer-director Martin McDonagh might ride the Academy Award performance wave into the winner’s circle for his original script.
But in the search for miracles, my eyes were on another category.
What do the following films have in common: The Shawshank Redemption; Fargo; Kundun; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Man Who Wasn’t There; No Country for Old Men; The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford; The Reader; True Grit; Skyfall; Prisoners; Unbroken; and Sicario? How about Roger Deakins as cinematographer? Beginning in 1995, Deakins earned Oscar nominations in cinematography for each of these films and wound up losing. Thirteen times. Last night, the 14th time was the charm as Deakins finally claimed the top prize for Blade Runner 2049, doing so against Rachel Morrison, the first female nominee in the category (Mudbound). With films like Sound of My Voice, Fruitvale Station and now Black Panther under her belt, let’s hope it doesn’t take Morrison as long as Deakins to grab some Oscar glory for herself.
Back to the top prize: I’m not sure how I feel about The Shape of Water as a Best Picture winner. From Call Me by Your Name (the very first film I saw at Toronto in 2017) and Lady Bird (Toronto was where the early buzz first kicked in) to my never-ending love affair with the Dee Rees drama Mudbound and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri plus the late sleeper dreams for Get Out, this year’s awards season was certainly a roller coaster ride — a long strange trip that has left me wondering what happened to the rules and the idea of expectations. I suppose there is some truth to the adage about rules being made to be broken.
In making picks, I’ve stopped largely living inside my head. I play the odds now. I read the tealeaves — scouting the winners from the various guilds (actors, writers, directors and producers) and a handful of the other known awards shows like the Independent Spirits. There’s a degree of sports analysis that goes into filling out an Oscar ballot that has absolutely nothing to do with personal preference.
I have to admit that The Shape of Water is only my third favorite Guillermo del Toro film behind Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos, even with its peerless performance from Sally Hawkins. But del Toro’s unconventional love story is the big fish of the season. Let the new hunt begin.
Regional audiences have one last (and quite necessary) opportunity to look back at the season when Cincinnati World Cinema screens the Academy’s live-action shorts program at Memorial Hall this Saturday and Sunday. Screenwriter/actress Rachel Shenton and director Chris Overton shared the spotlight as their short The Silent Child won the Oscar, but these films make winners of us all. Take the time to bask in the afterglow.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
06 Tuesday Mar 2018
The party animals (Top L-R) Cillian Murphy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Mortimer,
Cherry Jones (Bottom L-R) Patricia Clarkson, Timothy Spall, and Bruno Ganz
By T.T. Stern-Enzi
In the Mike Nichols classic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), a bitterly caustic couple, use another, much younger couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) as pawns in their never-ending and highly-codependent relationship war of attrition. While much of the action centers around the two couples captured in the claustrophobic setting of George and Martha’s home, following a larger party, the anticipated arrival of the older couple’s son the next day – for his birthday – proves to be the weapon with the potential to result in
mutual destruction.
Writer-director Sally Potter (“Orlando”) borrows from this premise for her new drama “The Party,” but ups the ante with a few more guests – like a progressive lesbian couple (Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer), a plain-spoken cynic (Patricia Clarkson), her German New Age paramour (Bruno Ganz), and a coked-up businessman (Cillian Murphy) with a gun and a hidden agenda. Potter grounds the proceedings in the marital discord between Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Bill (Timothy Spall), the seemingly happy hosts of a party celebrating Janet’s elevation as her government’s Minister for Health. We’re supposed to see Janet and Bill as the perfect power duo who have worked and sacrificed for this moment, but from the start, Bill looks more like an empty shell being dragged across the finish line of a three-legged race. The key narrative tension is in the waiting game that takes place as we prepare for Bill to come raging to life one last time.
In the meantime, Potter lets her talented cast cut loose in this chamber affair where wine and whining (in equal measure) spotlights every single microscopic fissure in the delicate façade these characters believe they have constructed. There is a certain joy in watching the brittle patrician armor of Clarkson’s American expat buckle under repeated blows. She can sleepwalk through a role like this, but she’s wide-awake in every moment, a raw nerve working overtime to mask the psychological hurt being inflicted. This turn serves as a stark and telling contrast to the hip and freewheeling types, like Emma Stone’s mother in “Easy A,” where she slips effortlessly into such different skins. I would argue that this is the finest example of an actor playing a “character” rather than a “type.”
Clarkson’s been in this situation before though, back in the 2003 indie dramedy “Pieces of April,” where she played the dying mother of the title character (Katie Holmes) who invites her family to her apartment for Thanksgiving dinner, a meal and event she is wholly unprepared for. While that film falls into the family holiday fiasco genre, the similarities to the disastrous party dynamic are worth the call for re-alignment. It could be argued that we are never more ourselves than when we’re attempting to put on a false happy face.
Which leads the discussion back to “The Party.” Potter’s aces in the hole are Thomas and Spall. With much of the early action keeping them in separate rooms – Thomas’s Janet is in the kitchen preparing her own celebratory meal, while Spall’s Bill mans the high fidelity record player in the living room where he mutters to himself – but we can tell the divide between them is far wider than the space between these two rooms. In fact, it is intriguing to observe how long it takes for the two characters to actually speak to one another.
Let’s just say, when that happens, the real fireworks of “The Party” kick off and we’re in for a series of twisted surprises. These relationship dramas always pretend to employ a few bitter laughs, but Potter’s staging removes the obvious ha-ha factor from the equation, leaving us wincing more often than not. There is simply nothing funny about adults wielding words and deeds in such intimately harmful fashion.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming ploughed the same terrain in their 2001 film “The Anniversary Party” playing a power couple questioning their work-personal dynamic on the eve of their anniversary. I can’t help but wonder if these films speak more to a particular upper class set than to everyday folks, and if so, has anyone ever wondered if regular people want to watch and bask in the “spectacular” disintegration of the lives of others.
No matter, because Potter’s “Party” foregoes the big bang, reminding us that another one will always be on the horizon, and we will be there, like happy flies drawn to the stink.
Rating: R; Grade: B
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, CityPaper Archives
06 Tuesday Mar 2018
Cincinnati Connection panel with Charisse Gibson
Source: New report highlights lack of diversity in Hollywood
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Gigs
05 Monday Mar 2018
Tags
DEATH WISH [R] D
While filmmaker Joe Carnahan (“Narc”), who gets a screenwriting credit for his adaptation/reboot of Brian Garfield’s novel which spawned the 1974 original movie starring Charles Bronson, has a noted fascination with the pulpier genre side of narrative storytelling, he’s always had a shrewd sense of humor about these exercises, which kept his projects from veering into dark brutality. Unfortunately, his script fell into the hands of Eli Roth (“Hostel”), a filmmaker who enjoys the sadistic and adds an unhealthy dose of conservative gun posturing and suburban white fear of urban violence. In this treatment, Dr. Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis), a white guy in a hoodie, gets dubbed “The Grim Reaper” for taking justice in his own hands with very little consideration for the oath he took to save lives. The movie seeks, I suppose, to support the idea that all we need is a good guy with a gun, but audiences should recognize how this simple-minded this fantasy really is.
RED SPARROW [R] D+
What a week at the box office for violent fantasies, right? From the conservative fever-dream of the “Death Wish” reboot to this Francis Lawrence collaboration with his “Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence, which seeks to turn “Atomic Blonde” into a “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” level espionage thriller but reduces its spy games to a series of sexual assault exchanges in search of an empowering message. When ballerina Dominika (Lawrence) suffers a career-ending injury, her creepy uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts) enlists her in a secret training program that weaponizes sexuality (of course, not before attempting to titillate us with scenes of sexual brutality). We’re supposed to recognize that Dominika utilizes the same focus that made her a near-great dancer to become a dominate spy, but the movie never spotlights these nuances. It fails even further by refusing to play to the kind of fun heroics that inform the fantasies of “Atomic Blonde” or superhero genre. The real lesson learned here: such aggressive brutality will leave audiences in the cold.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Briefs, CityPaper Archives
02 Friday Mar 2018
Movie Critic, TT Stern-Enzi, weighs in on his predictions for the 90th Academy Awards and tips audiences to the lack of surprises this awards season.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Gigs