OK, this is starting to look like some seriously twisted goings on.
Love Harbour’s take on the character, and I have to say, it’s had to grow on me because I was quite amused by Ron Perlman’s hulking slow-burn version of “Hellboy.”
Funny funny red band trailer (Uncensored, unfiltered, so if you’re delicate, move along — move along).
Nice use of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” in the score. Apt.
There are a lot of cartoons in cinemas this weekend — “Lego Movie: The Second Part,” “Into the Spider-Verse.”
And let’s be brutally blunt, “How to Train Your Dragon 3” isn’t all that. Once audiences started seeing it, those comically endorsement-happy reviews were going to induce head-scratching. I said as much, and damned if that hasn’t turned out to be the case.
“Joyless” is not a great word-of-mouth recommendation.
Second weekend numbers show “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” falling off the box office cliff. The $30-35 million second weekend projections of many are over 30% off, unless Saturday (traditionally the big take-the-kids-to-the-cartoon day) turns it around.
Bearing that in mind, Deadline.com may be off in projecting “A Madea Family Funeral” winning the weekend with a $25 million+ take, with “Dragon 3” fading in a plummeting fashion to $23 and change. Deadline is notorious for under-counting Saturday animation box office takes. But if this holds, that’s a 60% drop from “Dragon’s” opening weekend.
I saw “Madea” with a paying late afternoon matinee crowd in rural NC. Half-full house at 4:30? That’s telling. As Tyler Perry is giving the character her curtain call here (he’s not playing Madea again, he insists), longtime fans (older, female) are checking out her final bows.
“Greta,” the other new wide release, doesn’t have any branding or supernaturalism to make it appeal to today’s horror audiences — just a screen legend, Isabelle Huppert, abusing a beloved starlet (Chloe Grace Moretz) via stalking, kidnapping, etc. It’s not bad, but a $5 million+ is all she wrote for this Neil Jordan thriller.
“Alita: Battle Angel” will have to break even with its overseas take — down to $6 million this weekend.
“Green Book” is getting a decent Oscar bounce. No word yet on how re-issues of “Spider-Verse” and “Favourite” and “A Star is Born” are faring.
I guess it was too much to hope that Tyler Perry would send the old broad off in style.
He’s losing the dress, the fake chest, the wigs and the wildly uneven makeup and bidding everybody’s favorite auntie adieu with “A Madea Family Funeral.”
Decades of playing the character on stage, and screen — you can’t blame him for running out of gags, out of ideas and phoning it in. You CAN blame him for letting us SEE him phone it in.
He flings a funnier new Perry-in-heavy-makeup character at “Funeral,” a brother to his stand-bys, the preachy, threatening, Jesus mis-quoting, language-mangling Force of Nature Madea, and out-of-you-know-whats-to-give pothead/dirty-old man brother Joe.
Heathrow has no legs and an electrolarynx for his missing voice box. No, he didn’t lose that much of himself in ‘Nam. Blame “the diabetes” and cigarettes. It’s a funny effect and a great gag, making even limp lines the character growls
The film surrounding this unholy trio, their nephew Brian (Perry, out of drag) and Madea’s crusty running mates Hattie (Patrice Lovely) and Aunt Bam (Cassie Davis) is another Perry melodrama folded into Atlanta African American affluence.
It’s about a family of beautiful people — many of whom cheat. Madea and crew show up for an anniversary celebration just as the news that patriarch Anthony has died in the S & M clutches of a voluptuous and faithless family friend (Quin Barker).
Actually, they don’t “know” this. Only cheating Renee (Barker), cheating son Anthony (Courtney Burrell) and his brother’s fiance Gia (Aeriél Miranda) KNOW. They were having an assignation in the hotel room next door to Anthony’s bondage-games demise.
But the sharp-nosed Joe and Heathrow know. And Madea and her girls catch up. It’s all they can do to keep a lid on it when the widow, Vianne (Jen Harper) starts asking questions.Two
“Hotel?” Madea evades. “These ho’s don’t TELL.”
That soap opera stops the movie every time it moves front and center. Fortunately, Madea is put in charge of the hasty funeral.
“Two days? Black people do NOT bury people in two days!”
Perry’s pictures have always had outtakes which show his version of the “best joke on the set wins” tradition. The problem is, he’s not surrounded by funny people competing for the best line. It’s just him. And he’s run out of one-liners.
I doubt Davis and Lovely, the two hammy supporting actresses, come up with their own jokes. And everybody else Perry casts is a comic stiff. The melodrama is played straight — or straight-ish. Beautiful, buff shirtless black men and perfectly coiffed and made-up women who are the victims of these no good/no count yard dog males.
Boring characters boringly-played.
The big, multi-bedroom house and hotel settings, with all these cheaters, offer the promise of a “door slamming farce,” people stumbling into and out of rooms and the mistaken identities/intentions that follow. As comedy-savvy as Perry is, that’s beyond his dramaturgy.
His most promising homily is a scene in which young, professional Brian is schooled on the origins of “#BlackLivesMatter” when Madea instigates a traffic stop as he’s hauling them all to the party. Brian figures its a teachable moment on how Black people’s “compliance” would prevent all these police meltdowns and shootings.
Nope. Madea knows better. And Joe. Brian will, soon. But there aren’t enough gags there to pull the scene off, and like every other sequence in recent TP movies, it goes way beyond its comic payoff. His movies lack comic timing and pacing.
They’re slow, Joe.
His desperation to find a cheap laugh in many scenes has Joe doing something Classic Madea would never stand for — dropping the N-word for a giggle.
And there are continuity errors (including a doozy in the final act), blown lines and other signs Perry has moved on from big, brassy “Angry Black Woman” Madea.
I guess he’s letting us know we should move on, too.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude sexual content, language, and drug references throughout
Cast: Tyler Perry, Cassi Davis, Patrice Lovely, Courtney Burrell, Aeriél Miranda, Kj Smith
Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:44
“Iran” and “comedy” don’t often see themselves in the same sentence, but “3 Faces” is the latest entry in that rarest of cinema sub-genres.
Jafar Panahi, who made “Tehran Taxi” and the darkly funny/socially-biting “Offsides,” finds wry laughs amid the clashing cultures of rural, Azerbaijani Iran and the potentially offensive “liberation” of a life in cinema. It’s filled with wry laughs, comical rural “types” and over-the-top, fame-craving desperation worthy of an over-the-top slapback.
The “3 Faces” of the title are three generations of Iranian actresses — a modern day star, an aspiring starlet with a chance to attend a Tehran conservatory and a screen legend from before the Islamic Revolution, lying low, living alone in a backwater where everybody knows who she was and can shake their heads at what her talent and fame earned her.
A young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) sends a cell-phone video from her tiny village in Northern Iran. She is desperate, pleading with a movie star to save her. “I’ve loved cinema since I was little,” she declares (in Persian, with English subtitles). She’s won the chance to attend a film school/acting conservatory in Tehran, but her family is determined that she go through with their plans first (An arranged marriage?). THEN school.
“They betrayed me,” she wails. the jumpy, tense XCU cell-phone video ends with young Marziyeh hanging herself and the phone tumbling to the ground.
The actress she sends this to, the famed Behnaz Jafari, is distraught. She exits the set of her latest film, flaming red dye job and all, and gets her director — Jafar Panihi (See what they’re doing here?) — to drive her north to see what happened.
“If she’s dead, how could she send this?”
But the “film” is real enough to make them wonder if the kid hung herself. It’s just that the star is cynical enough to wonder if her director, who has pitched a suicide story to her as a project, is just messing with her.
If he is, this is quite the elaborate hoax. They’re way beyond paved roads, asking for directions to the village of Saran from locals who crack, “Your Turkish isn’t very good,” (in Turkish, with English subtitles).
Behnaz and Jafar “investigate” and try to reason out what might have happened, parsing every encounter. A wedding party on the mountain-girdling dirt path they’re driving means either that the girl didn’t kill herself, or they’re not close to Saran.
That whatever repressive steps the Islamic State to limit women’s rights never took hold in Iran is obvious from Behnaz’s doing most of the questioning — polite, discrete, “Did something just happen here?” She doesn’t want to give away that she’s fishing for a suicide.
They suspect “a cover-up,” just another one of those things the Islamic State doesn’t want the Iranian people to know is going on all around them. Ambitious, passionate, talented girls exist. And must be STOPPED.
The mere fact that these two unmarrieds are touring a waterless backwater like this is a tad subversive. And that’s the starting point for Panihi’s exploration of empowerment, repression and this local girl they start to hear about as they close in on her village.
“She didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.” And yet, she persisted.
It takes a while to pick up on the droll vibe Panihi was aiming for, here. We meet an old woman test-driving her freshly-dug grave, many locals they meet have a story of Shahrazade, a film star under the Shah, now in exile, a near-recluse on the edge of this very village.
The older star, first of the “3 Faces,” craved independence and artistic outlet and free expression and, it is implied, had a corrupting influence on young Marziyeh.
“She has brought DISHONOR to the family!” the most disapproving relative bellows at one and all. Some might agree, but most think he’s being a little extreme.
The biggest laugh here I won’t give away, save to mention that it involves a LOT of slapping. But there’s a general culture-clash whimsy about “3 Faces” that matches the funniest moments in “Offsides,” Panahi’s 2006 comedy about soccer mad women trying to sneak into the male-only world of Tehran’s soccer stadium.
A nation of religious philosophers resides all around these two film folks — “The world is unjust. It knew Noah as well as Solomon!”
Behnaz earns reactions from “Didn’t I just see you on TV?” to “We are honored by your presence!” culminating with, “Now that you’re here, how’s that TV series end?”
“Same as always,” she sighs. “Tears and mourning.”
Panihi, a pioneer of the Middle Eastern New Wave cinema? He’s mistaken for a bureaucrat, come to hear grievances about the water, the intermittent power outages, the roads.
“Didn’t you come here to help us?”
Actually, by creating another comedy for those “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” by making another film about the plight of women in backward theocracies, by finding fun in the “Green Acres” quaintness of rural Iran, that’s exactly what Panihi is doing.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with suicide, threats of violence
Cast: Behnaz Jafari, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Rezaei
Credits:Directed by Jafar Panahi, script by Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar . A Kino Lorber release.
Running time: 1:40
“How to Train Your Dragon 3” will still sit atop the top of the box office heap on this its second weekend. The only curiosity about that fact is how much audience will the kiddie cartoon lose on its second weekend? Box Office Mojo figures it’ll clear $32, which would be a healthy if not robust 40-42% fall off. So we’ll see.’
It will have more animated competition as Sony brings back the Oscar winning “Into the Spider-verse” to see if there’s an Oscar bounce in the blurry holiday season blockbuster.
That, and a “Lego Movie” sequel and the partially animated “Alita: Battle Angel,” means animation fans young and old will have a choice or two this weekend.
“The Favourite,” with an Oscar win for Olivia Colman, killing off Glenn Close’s best shot at the big prize — maybe her last shot — will add hundreds of screens and return to a multi-plex near you.
Lady Gaga’s “Shallow” Oscar win and engaging performance with Bradley Cooper at the Oscars means that “A Star is Born” is returning to theaters, another blockbuster looking for extra cash in what has been a seriously downbeat box office 2019. There’s new footage here, more Gaga, Warners says. Fans take note.
And Best Picture winner “Green Book” will remain in the Top Ten for another week or two, until “Captain Marvel” devours all NEXT weekend, anyway.
Newcomers? Tyler Perry is taking off the dress and wig and makeup and body padding after “A Madea Family Funeral.” It could exit with $22 million, as his franchise may be out of ideas, but has a lot of residual good will. A couple of funny films in that series, a lot of “Hire a JOKE writer ya cheapskate!” releases that Perry could not be talked into workshopping until they were worthy of release.
Maybe get Jordan Peele could take a look, offer a little feedback? He did wonders for that spoiled ingrate Spike Lee.
That’s one thing a more diverse Hollywood could rectify. With Peele and others gaining clout, a critical mass of decision makers who aren’t shy about telling a talented filmmaker who can’t get out of her or his own way “Sport, this needs WORK” should be entering the picture. Do white execs shy away from engaging or engaging with Spike Lee when his script is a little off? I’ve long thought Lee needed that kind of pushback, and I see evidence that he got it making “BlackKklansman.” Perry could use it, too. An African American producer with clout could work wonders on the raw material Perry puts out there, and tell Spike Lee “You can do better” without fear of getting called the name Spike likes to throw around a bit too cavalierly.
Then again, nobody has ever been able to tell Woody Allen anything, and it’s not like he wasn’t surrounded by an army of just-as-Jewish producers capable of giving him feedback that would have canceled half the movies he’s made in the past 15 years. So maybe not.
The other “old broad” at the cinema this weekend is Isabelle Huppert, who gives Chloe Grace Moretz all she can handle as “Greta.” Huppert, a star since the ’70s, hopefully regaled young Ms. Moretz with tales of life on the set of “Heaven’s Gate.”
“Greta” could scare up about $5 million at the box office.
One-time “Starship Trooper” Casper Van Dien gets off easy in “Chokehold,” a bloody, bone-snapping B-movie set in the world of off-the-books “no rules” mixed martial arts brawling in Arkansas.
Van Dien’s character is killed off in the first act. Top billed, and home before anybody misses him. Nice work, if you can get it.
He’s here just long enough to show us he’s got some moves before his character’s estranged daughter — fighter and screen newcomer Melissa Croden — takes over, takes the hits and carries the movie for the remaining 70 minutes.
That movie, a vengeance tale about a daughter trying to prove herself in her sport, confront the MMA mobster (Ilona McCrea) who murdered her dad and collect some fight purses as she does, is a lump on the mat — inert, from its inane plot and colorless dialogue to the slo-mo fights which demonstrate the concept of “stage punch” to those who’ve never been able to pick up on them in better fight movies. Where, you know, the fact that you’re not ACTUALLY hitting somebody is masked.
Croden is Zoe, a brawler who envisions a future for herself in her father’s sport, but in Vegas, where the MMA action actually is.
The cleverest piece of filmmaking co-writer/director Brian Skiba manages is the parallel construction that shows us Zoe getting knocked out in Vegas as Dad, Javier (Van Dien) fights and fights and is finally done in by a firearm way east in Arkansas.
Zoe settles in at Dad’s old gym, links up with Dad’s favorite female trainer (Corinne Van Ryck de Groot) and grits her teeth through cops who seem disinterested in finding Dad’s killer.
“Your father was in a dangerous business, one that likes to keep its secrets ‘secret,'” is all the unkempt detective (Diego Diablo del Mar, most colorful stage name ever) offers.
Zoe, trained by Renee (Van Ryck de Groot), dives into the fight scene, promoted by Jones (Lochlyn Munro), works her way through assorted female brutes, the sort who offer no quarter, and won’t take it, either.
“Give up! GIVE UP! Before I break your arm!”
They never listen.
Eventually, Zoe must face Tatiana. That’s the only way to get to boss Natalia (McRea), a sadistic she-devil whose Russian overlords are putting the financial screws to her even as she’s kicking sparring partners through tables and walls — just for kicks.
A clumsy device — Dad’s “training videos,” video letters to Zoe — is introduced but mercifully abandoned.
Aside from the Russian intrigues and an opportunistic Scot (Gianni Capaldi), there’s nothing to this story outside of the bloodier-than-bloody bouts. No love interest, no real benefit to the addition of Uncle Ray (Kip Pardue) to Zoe’s fighting life.
With nothing but fights to recommend it, they’d better be good, right?
They aren’t. The choreography is elaborate, but gives itself away, lower level pro wrestling style. They’re not fights, they’re half-speed dances with big sweeping kicks and punches ducked in close-up. So that we can see, you know, how fake it all is.
They turn “Chokehold” from the B-movie Van Dien signed on for to a D-movie by its closing credits, a clumsily plotted and directed thriller that’s a primer on how stage punches work, how fake it all can look when we’re supposed to believe the pugilists are actually landing blows.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Casper Van Dien, Melissa Croden, Ilona McCrea, Corinne Van Ryck de Groot, Lochlyn Munro and Kip Pardue
Credits: Directed by Brian Skiba, script by Brian Skiba, Craig Michael Hall An Ammo release.
Credits: 1:37
Here’s the movie that will probably own June. As this latest X-Men adaptation brings the gang back one more time and opens June 7.
Far too many movies about teens, sexuality and growing up relegate the adults to afterthoughts. The kids have to work it all out for themselves, because in the movie’s universe, the grownups are distracted, self-absorbed, overworked or worse.
The moment that tells us “Giant Little Ones,” a Canadian drama about sexual confusion and the increasingly fluid spectrum we’re understanding sexuality to be, is different is when the school swim coach mishandles the harassment of a gay swimmer, but does it in a way that shows compassion and good intentions.
“Cut the crap,” he tells his boys. Even the coaches are evolving in this corner of Canada.
“Giant” is about Franky (Josh Wiggins) and Balles (Darren Mann), two lifelong friends and teammates tested by a moment of sexual curiosity.
Franky is pale, sensitive with delicate features and a general timidity about sex. Balles is brawny, brash, confident — bragging about how many times he had sex with his girl (Kiana Madeira) before school as they meet to bike-ride to classes.
Franky? He’s playing the part, but getting “Is there someone you like better?” questions from his shallow, equally virginal girlfriend Priscilla (Hailey Kittle).
Balles is a swaggering jock, never shying away from a fight, bludgeoning the rednecks who tease the boys at the local convenience store. Franky isn’t, and his attempts to converse with Balles’ shunned sister Natasha (Taylor Hickson) with a sad face and serious drinking problem, suggest both history and sensitivity. And even though he’s not sticking up for the gay kid on the swim team, the fact that his other BFF is a Gay BFF (Niamh Wilson), a girl who is comically experimenting with her own sexual identity (flannel, baseball caps, “strap-ons”) speaks volumes.
In cinematic terms, Franky looks the part so he must be…
A night of partying throws Franky and Balles together. It doesn’t matter that Balles is all “Never would’ve happened…we were wasted.” Franky, still denying he’s “gay,” even to GBFF Mouse (Wilson), knows something did.
But coping with Balles’ version of events, which he spreads all over school, is a teen crisis like few others. Social shunning, gossip and even violence follow. The lifelong friends are at war, which brings their families — adults — into the picture.
The actors are proficient at playing kids who are an up-to-date collection of “types,” none more than “Mouse,” who lacks only a motorcycle to achieve full stereotype status. But Mouse’s “You should OWN this” advice is treated like the cliche it is. Sexuality is understood to be more complicated, now. “Surrender, Dorothy,” and build a Lady Gaga belly-baring shirt collection with eye makeup to match isn’t the only choice life offers today’s Frankys.
It’s the adults who surprise us here, playing catch-up on the learning curve. Maria Bello plays Franky’s seemingly too-self-involved to-get-it Mom. But she does. Kyle MacLachlan (terrific) is the father Franky shuns because…well, Dad left Mom for another man.
Peter Outerbridge also impresses as Balles’ dad, trying to smooth troubled waters, trying to understand, reaching out.
It’s all a bit on-the-nose, but writer-director Keith Behrman keeps it topical and touching, even if he never quite transcends prioritizing that topicality.
We’re past “Own it,” and labeling sexuality is starting to seem very 2000-and-late. That makes the tentative, exploratory steps taken here “Giant Little Ones,” no matter how big a deal they are to the kids taking them.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language and some drug/alcohol use all involving teens
Cast: Josh Wiggins, Taylor Hickson, Darren Mann, Maria Bello, Kyle MacLachlan and Niamh Wilson
Credits: Written and directed by Keith Behrman. A Vertical Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:33
The heavyweight boxer who took a title, but so wished to not be a fighter that every time he stepped into the ring,, he”wished that the city got hit by a massive blackout, or a f—–g tornado,” anything to save him from the fight — the golfer whose epic collapse went down in the annals of the sport’s history, an English football club, about to be relegated into oblivion — kicked out of the sport — these are the “Losers” of Netflix’s delightful, touching, laugh-out loud documentary series “Losers.”
Eight snack-size (about 30 minutes each) portraits are painted of Canada’s top curlers, Torquay’s woebegone soccer team, future trainer-to-the-stars and character actor Michael Bentt, golfer Jean van de Velde and others — people who plunge into the ignominious “darkness” of the ultimate humiliation — getting knocked out, having a “Tin Cup” sized collapse on the 18th hole of the British Open, having your team and town removed from the ranks of competitive British soccer.
Director Mickey Duzyj comes from an animation background, and uses interviews, archival footage, painted recreations and animation to tell the story of — for instance, Michael Bentt, a New York prize-fighter bullied and beaten into the ring by a brute of a father.
“The Miscast Champion” features Bentt, who stumbled into a title only to lose it in spectacular fashion, taking us into his worst moment and the light that came after it.
We don’t really need Ron Shelton, who directed “Bull Durham,””White Men Can’t Jump” and “Tin Cup” to tell us “Boxers are the bravest people in the world.” Bentt, a towering presence with a Hollywood mien, took abuse from his old man (a Jamaican immigrant) and quaked at the thought of every fight, shows us what that means — terrified of the beating he’d received, the shame of being knocked out, all of it. Shelton turned out to be Bentt’s salvation (helping him get cast as boxer Floyd Patterson in “Ali”).
Torquay, “The English Riviera,” might best be known as home to “Fawlty Towers,” the John Cleese sitcom about a haplessly run hotel in a resort that’s long in the tooth and not exactly a top tourist draw. But when their century old football club, half-burned stadium, sullen fans and all, faced “relegation” out of the sport for not being competitive, the town rallied, got terribly invested and clung to hope that this 1985 final match would not be their last ever.
If you don’t know about the Alsatian police dog who saved Torquay United, you’ve missed one of the funniest, sunniest and silliest tales in all of sport, related in “The Jaws of Victory.”
And if you’ve never considered the grace, peculiarity, good humor and good manners (a quintessential Canadian sport) of that “loser” of a sport, curling, “Stone Cold” will remedy that.
“Losers” makes winners out of its subjects, and tickles and occasionally enlightens the viewer as it does. These aren’t definitive versions of these assorted tales, going just deep enough to pique our interest and send us to the next fascinating episode. But that’s precisely what’s called for, here, in what might be the best sports doc series ESPN never did.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Credits: Directed by Mickey Duzyj. A Netflix release.
Running time: Eight short documentaries, about 30 minutes each
People are still working themselves into a tizzy of outrage over who winds up winning Hollywood’s annual popularity contest and laughably inaccurate recognition of cinematic excellence.
Spike Lee reminds us that he hasn’t mellowed with age, taking all the acceptance speech time from the other winning writers for his multi-handed script Oscar for “BlackKklansman,” trying to storm out of the Kodak Theater when “Green Book” wins best picture and unloading on the movie to one and all when he loses.
Classy. Petulant, privileged and same old prickly bantam rooster, Spike.
I was rooting for a “BlackKklansman” upset and for Spike to get his due as best director. But all he did was remind me of the many times we’ve spoken in interviews, which sometimes went pleasantly and often did not due to his awful mood.
He forgot last year, but never mind.
Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan exchange “sideeyes” over “Green Book” winning Best Picture. So?
And on and on it goes. Over an award handed out by a vastly expanded and more diverse Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which still gets it wrong and pretty much always has. Same old Oscars.
But I think Chang accidentally hit on something pertinent to the whole argument. What do “Crash” and “Green Book” have in common? As I said in my review of “Green Book,” it’s “cinematic comfort food for the holidays.” “Crash” had that going for it, too. Optimism.
Comforting to whom? The vast majority of moviegoers, who want to feel good, even if the ugly truth is given a fresh coat of assuaged guilt, would be the answer.
“Crash,” manipulative as it was, covering a range of LA experiences re: race and crime and a roiled populace, was in the end, on the upbeat side. Good performances by Cheadle and others, a brittle turn by Bullock — and the film’s win was universally ridiculed.
“Crash,” like “Green Book,” made the viewer “feel” something. That’s the biggest thing they have in common. Anybody “feel” anything over the death in “A Star is Born,” over the life of privilege contrasted with powerlessness in “Roma,” “The Favourite” or “BlackKklansman?”
No? Then there’s my point.
Perhaps the only “worse” outcome this year would have been a “Bohemian Rhapsody” Best Picture win.
Seeing Javier Bardem joyously singing and dancing to “We Will Rock You” in the show’s opening number was THE telling moment of this year’s Academy Awards. “Bohemian Rhapsody” made Queen fans feel the way their songs and concert performances used to make us feel. Despicable director, lip-syncing star and all, it had that going for it.
Mahershala Ali seemed to be carrying the weight of “Green Book’s” vigorous social media, and yes “social justice warrior” beatdowns during his Best Supporting acceptance speech — stammering, at a loss for words, guilt-ridden. He didn’t have to accept the nomination, and he read the script. He didn’t have to accept the role.
But he saw something ennobling in the enterprise, the characterizations. As did Viggo Mortensen. They took a flier on Peter Farrelly being able to pull this off, and delivered a winner.
Farrelly? The second most classless performance by a director on Oscar night — ego tripping when he could have made the case for what “Green Book” actually is, what their intentions were, and defused a lot of this hatred. Nope. Read a laundry list of people nobody knows, crack a joke or two, make it all about “me.”
“Green Book” wasn’t the best picture of 2018. You could make the case for “First Reformed,” “Leave No Trace” or “The Favourite.” There were others that could have been nominated.
The rallying around “Roma” and “Black Panther” was misguided and tone deaf and created false expectations for middling movies. That sideeye, Chadwick, was ridic. Your comic book movie, as on-the-nose in its uplift as “Green Book,” deathly dull dialogue and triumphalist pose and all, didn’t deserve a nomination.
Chadwick Boseman’s been better in most every film I’ve seen him in, including the more moving, thrilling and problematic “Get on Up,” which should have been a Best Picture and Best Actor contender years back.
Oscar and the critics’ groups which delight in their “Oscar influence” got that wrong, too.
People remember “The Right Stuff,” “The Martian,” “Being There,” “Dunkirk,” “Loving,” “Get On Up,” “All is Lost” (a personal favorite) even if not everybody remembers which film the Academy voted into Oscar glory.
Who remembers “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which my friend Matt Olien labels “the worst Best Picture winner ever?” Snobs may smirk at “Dances With Wolves,” but there’s a reason it turns on TV constantly. “Do the Right Thing” might have been Spike Lee’s best picture, but with “Field of Dreams” and “Dead Poets Society” up against it, was he “robbed?”
Give it a few years, see if anybody’s still griping about how “Black Panther” was robbed after its formulaic twist on comic book “alternate history” has a sequel or two under its belt and its shortcomings (indifferent performances, cut and paste script, etc.) become obvious even to the oxygen deprived.
“Roma” is already forgotten, save by those who’ve never bothered to watch black and white Fellini classics which were its inspiration.
But the outrage over this Oscars goes on — trolling every moment of the telecast.
Rami Malek lets slip that Freddie Mercury was a “gay man” and Twitter explodes. The character went from being not gay enough for “Bohemian Rhapsody” to not stir up outrage, to its Oscar winning star taking heat for not covering all the nuances in Mercury’s bisexuality (married) in an acceptance speech.
A critic I don’t know had the most hilarious take-down of Malek on Twitter. Alonso Duralde urged Twitter users to “watch ‘Get On Up'” if you want to see a musical biopic in which the star (Chadwick Boseman, whom fanboys know can do no wrong) “did his own singing.”
Judas Priest, man. Are you blind and deaf? Any fool could tell Boseman wasn’t singing there, that was lip-syncing to the one-and-only James Brown. But even so, LOOK IT UP.
It’s enough to make you miss the days when Oscars were handed out pre-Twitter, when just you and your friends could fume over “The English Patient” or Dustin Hoffman winning for “Kramer vs. Kramer” while Peter Sellers went to his grave without an Academy Award.
Yeah, they vote on these awards and yes, they always get it wrong. Pretty much always, anyway.
Movie Nation 