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Academy Awards, Anthony Hopkins, FOX19, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Demme, Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, tt stern-enzi
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
24 Wednesday Mar 2021
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Academy Awards, Anthony Hopkins, FOX19, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Demme, Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, tt stern-enzi
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
22 Monday Feb 2021
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
11 Monday Jun 2018
HOTEL ARTEMIS [R] C-
Writer-director Drew Pearce (the writer-producer of “Iron Man 3” at the helm for the first time) takes a page from the creative team behind “John Wick,” crafting a mythic world where criminals attempt to live by exacting codes of order. In the case of “Hotel Artemis,” we get a slightly futuristic nightmare with a haven – of sorts – for the wrongdoers, a fortified hospital that forces the villains to leave their weapons at the gates and promise not to kill each other or harm the staff, while in their care. The Nurse (Jodie Foster) tends to an assortment of thieving killers (Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Charlie Day, and Brian Tyree Henry) with assistance from an orderly named Everest (Dave Bautista). The trick here is to slow everything down and make the audience wait for the explosive eruption to come. Thanks to Foster and Bautista, there’s humor, but less of a payoff than we might have hoped for. That is due, in part, to the focus on a protagonist intent on stitching folks up rather than ripping them apart.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Briefs, CityPaper Archives
13 Thursday Apr 2017
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Written by Lima, Ohio native Tom Flynn, ‘Gifted’ revolves around Frank, a single guy struggling to raise his young niece, who happens to be a mathematics prodigy.
Chris Evans and McKenna Grace in new drama “Gifted” PHOTO: WILSON WEBB/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP.
The first time I saw the trailer for Gifted, the new film from director Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer), I was instantly reminded of the soft spot I harbor for Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate. Foster’s directorial debut presented a brief glimpse behind the mystique of her own beautiful mind. On screen, as the single mother of a brilliant child, she radiated a fierce intelligence, the ticking of an inner clock set to its own rhythm, and I wondered what it had taken in her to develop and bring forth that quality into the world.
Of course, you could argue that we shouldn’t attempt to read too much about a well-known director’s or actor’s life story into his/her films. Which is part of what makes Gifted a safer narrative case study. There is no direct link or basis to a true story, just the emotional and psychological questions of the narrative.
The film’s screenplay was a 2014 selection of the Black List, an annual survey by film-industry executives of their favorite undeveloped scripts. Written by Lima, Ohio native Tom Flynn, it follows the efforts of Frank (Chris Evans), a single guy struggling to raise his young niece Mary (Mckenna Grace — a kindergarten mini-me of Emma Watson), who happens to be a mathematics prodigy. Frank has retreated from the academic towers and think-tanks of Boston, settling down with Mary in Florida, where he repairs boat engines and hopes to raise the girl in as normal an environment as possible.
We come to realize that Mary’s mother was also special, a gifted mathematician destined to solve a theoretical problem and thus alter our understanding of science and technology. But she lived such a sheltered existence that she had trouble juggling this higher purpose with the greater mysteries of human interaction.
Sometime soon after giving birth to Mary, she arrived at Frank’s doorstep with her infant daughter and a precarious plan she set in motion when she decided to take her own life.
Thanks to a haunted performance by Evans, we appreciate the burden of Frank’s position. Six years later, he’s eking out a meager living, safeguarding secrets about Mary and himself. His landlord (Octavia Spencer) keeps Mary Friday nights. But his desire for anonymity doesn’t last — he and Mary attract the attention of her kindergarten teacher Bonnie (Jenny Slate), who detects their obvious and quite extraordinary gifts.
Gifted, under more traditional studio care, could have easily remained a sentimental tearjerker. But I would beg audiences to follow director Webb and screenwriter Flynn beneath the surface trappings.
The timely arrival of Frank’s mother Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), the domineering Brit who hones in with furious and righteous intent on Mary as the successor to her mother’s capabilities, provides the antagonist we’ve been waiting for. Yet, as the familial dispute between mother and son escalates into the inevitable courtroom battle, the creative team sneaks in several subtle twists that upset our expectations. Throughout the proceedings, Frank and Evelyn continue to have intimate talks, catching up on one another’s lives with some degree of genuine warmth and appreciation. Evans and Duncan remind us that these two are indeed family and that those bonds, while strained, have not been completely severed.
But the real gift of the narrative is the focus on Frank, which presents him as a bright light in his own right. Before taking over Mary’s care, Frank had an academic career and ample time to enjoy the fruits of his more personable attributes. By the time we see him, though, little of that former life and man remains; instead Frank subsists on guilt and duty. Evans richly expresses all of these facets of Frank, even redirecting our associations of him as the perfectly steadfast superhero Captain America. The toned physique is there but, in this case, it bears an impossible weight and vulnerability.
All of this transforms Frank into the ideal nurturing presence, but he’s also evolving. No studio would ever dream of creating a sequel to a movie like Gifted, but I would love to catch up with Frank a few years from now to see how this walking wound of a man with a beautiful mind of his own has grown. Maybe Evans and Foster should consider a marvelous teaming up. (Opens wide Wednesday.) (PG-13) Grade: B
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
16 Monday May 2016
MONEY MONSTER [R] B-
Going into “Money Monster,” I anticipated a smart and savvy thriller reminiscent of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man,” a brilliant caper with a surprising twist rooted in real world concerns and history that somehow never seemed like a cheapening of those issues. Jodie Foster, as both a performer and director, exudes prestige and a willingness to challenge (and confound) expectations, and here, matched up with the likes of George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Dominic West and Giancarlo Esposito; I assumed “Money Monster” would be white-knuckle affair. The real surprise is just how pedestrian the movie feels, playing familiar notes. When doomed Everyman (Jack O’Connell) takes an outrageous cable financial TV host (Clooney) hostage after a stock market glitch leads to questions of conspiracy, we know the glib host will embark on a journey of truth and redemption, but I wanted Foster to make “Monster” a bit more culturally and politically relevant, when instead she seems content to simply drag us along for a high-speed joyride.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Briefs, CityPaper Archives
10 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
inIt seems fitting to note that Carnage, the new film from Roman Polanski, is an adaptation based on Yasmina Reza’s play Le Dieu du carnage, which translates in English to God of Carnage. Reza penned the screenplay, and much attention was paid to the omission of the “God of” as Carnage arrived in theaters.
As the universe expands under the direction of Polanski, as the walls collapse — well, not really, because except for a bird’s eye prologue and coda gazing down on a New York City schoolyard, the audience is locked either inside a tightly configured apartment or the hallway approaching the elevator (and the tantalizing promise of escaping into that great wide world just off the stage) — we begin to realize the effect is quite the opposite. Everything contracts. The world, the inciting incident, the response, it all seems small and the players small-minded.
Two sets of New York parents come together for a private mediation session as a result of a playground dispute between their sons, which left one of the boys with dental trauma after a vicious skirmish involving a baby Ruthian swing of a fallen tree limb. The son of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) sustained injury and eagerly invite Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) to negotiate a peaceable settlement that none of them seems to believe the boys could reach on their own.
This should be candy, a dark and bitter chocolate morsel for Polanski, because the root of the play is all about the darkly brutal and childish nature of Man.
We have evolved into civilized beings, sentient creatures with a sense of our own humanity, a respect for the rights of others and an appreciation for the rules and laws we have agreed to let bind us together, but we are not so far removed, are we, from our more primitive selves, the bite-strike-shoot first mentality, the kill or be killed survivalist urges.
Polanski, in Death and the Maiden (1994), another adaptation, this time from an Ariel Dorfman play about a political activist (Sigourney Weaver) who comes to believe that a guest (Ben Kingsley) in her home had once tortured her and decides to turn the tables on him, presented the feral intensity of a psychological and physical battle of wits and wills and made us feel the salt rubbed in those terribly raw wounds. There was danger and doubt lurking in every exchange because the two sides (and the audience as well) were striking from one-eyed, half-blind positions that felt real and urgent.
That sense is part of what is missing from Carnage. The parents have overstepped their bounds, seeking to settle a dispute between children from the world of children. By intruding here, they have not brought higher reason to bear; rather, they have lowered themselves, reverting back to the pettiness of childhood — the sticks and stones and crude one-upmanship that they should have grown out of along the way. They have moved further away from the enlightenment we seek from a higher power or even the absolute rendering of power that might settle the dispute.
The play is supposed to be a comedy, a masterful skewering of adult sensibilities, and the possibility for comic revelation seems more obvious in the original Broadway cast (Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden, all of whom were nominated for Tony Awards, with Harden winning Best Leading Actress), but Polanski and his stellar ensemble heavily underline the sneeringly dramatic vanity of these flimsy stock characters so much that the audience will beat a hasty retreat, except for those faithful few who are hopelessly enamored with an individual performer or two and are willing to follow them off the cliff. I wanted to hang in there and support any and all of them (because each in their own way has thoroughly enchanted me elsewhere), but I think I was put off moreso because I knew these characters too-well. They are who we have become — full of empty righteousness and pseudo-intellectual leanings backed up by nothing, not even enough hot air to keep our pompous thought balloons afloat.
Not only is the “God of” missing here, but Polanski’s version of Carnage is definitely lowercased and proof that we are getting smaller and smaller every second. Grade: C (tt stern-enzi)
24 Tuesday May 2011
Posted Black Eye, CityPaper Archives
inTags
Mel Gibson is not a half-assed kind of guy. He’s all in. To paraphrase Mae West, “When he’s good, he’s very good,” but when he’s bad, he’s good and crazy. It seems this applies to both his life and his movie roles. For every instance where Gibson has said or done something horribly inappropriate, there’s someone willing to stand up for him, and not just random Hollywood types, but people from across the socio-cultural spectrum – gender, religion, class and race. He touches people and he certainly touches nerves, which is what makes it difficult to review his latest performance in The Beaver, two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster’s third feature at the helm. Her sensibilities tend towards intimate dramas and quiet character studies that rarely drill into the emotional depths she mines as an actress, but it seems as if, with The Beaver, she’s willing to allow Gibson to dive headlong into a dark pit, an abyss of the self that’s far too familiar.
Toy company president Walter Black (Gibson) is slipping. On the verge of succumbing to suicidal tendencies, he finds a lifeline in the form of a hand puppet, a ratty old beaver that talks him off the ledge and soon starts speaking for him full-time in a heavy accent reminiscent of Ray Winstone circa Sexy Beast (minus the awesomely foul tongue). Walter passes out cards informing people that the Beaver is a therapeutic intervention. The Beaver works like a charm at the office where the puppet kick starts a revival of the company and proves to be a promotional genie.
At home, though, the results are more mixed. Walter’s wife Meredith (Foster) begrudgingly accepts the situation in the beginning because the couple was one step away from separating and suddenly Walter, through the Beaver, reconnects with their youngest son Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) and warms considerably in his relations with her. But older son Porter (Anton Yelchin), with his own share of problems at school, refuses to cozy up to the puppet that has seemingly become the master of his father.
It all has to come to a head, of course, although before the confrontation, there’s the sadly creepy sense of watching Gibson’s own therapy sessions played out on the screen. The man (let’s call it the “good” side), the fool (the “good and crazy” side), and the actor (the combination of the two) fight for supremacy and in what proves to be a close match, the actor wins out.
Gibson’s performance “dances with the devil in the pale moonlight.” There’s no attempt to use ventriloquism, so we see Walter’s mouth moving, but after audiences overcome the initial distraction of this set-up, what Gibson is up to slowly reveals itself. He is infusing the puppet with life beyond the words and a real character, separate and distinct from Walter, emerges. The Beaver moves of his own accord and draws attention away from Walter, a man seeking a dam or a barrier against the world at large. This leads to the puppet sensing that it has become the dominant presence in the pairing and forcing Walter towards the inevitable act to reclaim control of his life.
There is humor and kindness in what Gibson is able to accomplish here and that comes largely from working with a director like Foster, an obviously genuine friend and supporter, but also a filmmaker with the ability to create a safe space, and one not simply devoted to spinning his unfortunate actions in the media cycle. The Beaver highlights the first step, after the third or fourth slide, on the road to recovery. (tt stern-enzi)