Popcorn Culture: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 2

I did it! For the first time in my life, I've actually seen every film nominated for Best Picture in a particular year! Am I glad it was this year? Probably not, but at least I can feel accomplished. Here are my mini-reviews for the final two bricks in that wall.

Phantom Thread

Year: 2017

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville 

Run Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A meticulous and demanding couture designer meets and seduces a young woman, who becomes his muse and eventually enters a battle of manners and wills in the power struggle between him, her, and his spinster sister.

Phantom Thread is a hard movie to review, because it's so impeccably structured and designed that it's impossible to ignore the skill and craft that went into its creation. But it's at least a little difficult to find a foothold and manifest an active interest in the proceedings, which are appropriately chilly and at arm's length. 

There's hardly a fault in the visual world that Paul Thomas Anderson, costume designer Mark Bridges (who has worked with PTA since his debut, but more importantly worked on Dollman vs. Demonic Toys and Waxwork II: Lost in Time) and production designer Mark Tildesley (who worked on 28 Days Later... and aren't you glad you're reading my commentary, because nobody else would be telling you these important things) have created, which is pristine and precise from top to bottom.

The fun of this movie comes when you place the three actors into this toy box and send them spinning into one another. At first their interactions are as stiff and formal as the scenery, but as they settle into their roles, it quickly becomes clear that this is the ensemble of the year. I don't have a lot of respect for Daniel Day-Lewis' ostentatious style of preparing for a role, but he does do a good job, although he is conspicuously the weakest link in this trio. Krieps is doing tremendously subtle work here that quietly, almost imperceptibly builds toward an incredibly bold set of actions in the final act that you wouldn't have thought her capable of just 90 minutes before. And Manville is incredibly frightening as a woman whose stiff, prim confidence can weather any storm. With these two in the room, Day-Lewis just looks like a child play-acting that he's fancy.

I really did warm to this movie but he third act, but there's no avoiding the fact that at times it's quite dull, progressing from stiff scene to stiff scene at the pace of an arthritic snail. It's probably the artiest art film on the slate, and that just isn't really what gets my engine revved. But if you like angry, horny, twisted comedies of manners, it's worth it to stick around.

Rating: 6/10

Darkest Hour

Year: 2017

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Winston Churchill must find the strength to lead England into what seems like an unwinnable war against the Nazis, after he is voted prime minister by a parliament that has no real faith in him.

Darkest Hour has reputation already for being the most flagrantly terrible of the year's Oscar slate, but for my money no film is as actively anti-entertaining as The Post, so this film is safe from my wrath. Unfortunately, it has nothing to offer other than not sucking so hard your fillings dislodge from your teeth. It's the most aggressively average bit of Awards bait in a year full of projects that - good or bad - are all at least unique in some way.

Like all performances the Academy loves to reward, Gary Oldman does nothing to push the craft forward other than drowning himself in prosthetics and shouting as loud as he possibly can without having his fake jowls wobble right off his face. His portrayal of Winston Churchill is a screeching caricature, constantly winking at the history buffs in the audience while conspicuously failing to craft an actual human character.

We're meant to take his abuse of the other characters in the movie as a charming symptom of his passion and eccentric individualism. At least Phantom Thread had the decency to know how twisted its control-freak character was, we're supposed to root for this blowhard. And in the process of this extravagant yelling, every other character is shoved against the wall and flattened to one dimension at best as they act out a grab bag of real life scenarios, including - mysteriously - the decision to evacuate the troops at Dunkirk, which is just a grim reminder that you could have been watching Dunkirk instead of this movie.

The best thing I can say about Darkest Hour is that it's at least shot well. Joe Wright and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (who shot the sumptuously gorgeous Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as well as Amélie and Inside Llewyn Davis) have a way of isolating Churchill inside the frame that isn't the least bit subtle, but is far more emotionally satisfying than any scrap of dialogue, for stimulating the audience using visual beauty rather than desperate wheezing.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 874

Très Jolie

Year: 2014
Director: Robert Stromberg
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sharlto Copley
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

The best I can say about first time director Robert Stromberg's Maleficent is that at least its miles better than its "gritty fairy tale reboot" brethren, the dreary Snow White and the Huntsman, the lightweight Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, the much derided 2010 Alice in Wonderland, and the quickly forgotten Shyamalan-lite fable Red Riding Hood.

That's not saying much and Maleficent isn't much, but at least it's not a night at the movies that you're going to regret for years to come. It turns out that this film, or at least this character, has been something of a pet project for star Angelina Jolie for quite some time, which means that even when the rest of the movie lies anemic and twitching around her, she can always be counted on to bring depth and gravitas to the situation.

And the power of pure glam.

The alternative fairy tale goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a beautiful fairy named Maleficent (Angeline Jolie), who was the protectress of the fairy realm, located in the moors alongside the human kingdom. Despite her horns and terrifying Lady Gaga facial protrusions, she was a kind and gentle fairy. One day, when a human boy named Stefan (Sharlto Copley) meets her in the woods, an unlikely friendship is born, one that seems to extend beyond the long-standing hatred between man and fairy.

That is, until Stefan drugs Maleficent and cuts off her wings in order to become ruler of the realm (the kingship had been offered to anybody who could vanquish Maleficent because apparently nobody had told them that nepotism was a thing yet). So, one harrowing rape metaphor later, Maleficent is stunted by man's greed and vows revenge on the new king - the man who made her lose faith in True Love.

Yadda yadda, you've seen Sleeping Beauty. She curses his daughter that she'll prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a sleep like death that can only be ended by True Love's Kiss, which to her is just a huge middle finger because she truly doesn't believe such a thing exists. Clearly, she hasn't seen Frozen yet, although technically the laws of statistics state that anybody who hasn't seen Frozen has actually already seen it 2.3 times.

Do you wanna build a leaf man?

So the baby Aurora (Elle Fanning, eventually) is sent to be raised far away from the castle until the day after her sixteenth birthday, under the care of three bumbling fairies, Flittle (Lesley Manville), Knotgrass (Imelda Staunton), and Thistletwit (Juno Temple). When the careless fairies almost starve the poor child to death, Maleficent is forced to be a reluctant caretaker for the child to make sure she survives long enough to actually feel the effects of the curse.

So here we have Maleficent, the villain with a heart of gold.

And cheekbones of diamond.

I shan't spoil what happens after that, because that's no fun, is it? Suffice it to say that Angelina Jolie is forever and always the best part of any scene she is in, although the portentous music by James Newton Howard is a close second, full of droll evilness and a perfect combination with Jolie to instill the film with the sense of how much fun she is having playing this role.

It's a good thing either of those exists at all, because man is the rest of the film that surrounds it middling to awful. Elle Fanning is blisteringly annoying and flat as the vacuous Aurora and Sharlto Copley offers nothing interesting in a generic villain role, paling in comparison to the far more appealing villain that is the protagonist.

And the CGI that creates most of fairyland looks like somebody forgot to render it and even Henry, my resident silver lining enthusiast, had scant praise: "At least it was better than Days of Future Past."

True, but Days of Future Past had Shawn Ashmore, so I'm willing to trade any day.

But the biggest flaw, one that constricts the entire film in a tight boa constrictor chokehold, is the pacing. Every single scene, beat, and moment of the movie is inexplicably rushed, and much of the character development and many of the major events feel like they're played on fast forward. Maleficent's shift from cackling villain to reluctant overseer takes place in the space between two scenes, Prince Phillip (Oculus' Brenton Thwaites) is only in the film for a grand total of about 34 seconds (although it's not like he needs more - he is more useless than ever here), and I'm going to mention this because it's so egregious, but I'll have to put it in spoiler blocks, [Aurora, popularly known as "Sleeping Beauty" is only asleep for about two minutes. Not just in movie time. She's literally asleep for two minutes in the context of her own story. It's more like "Napping Beauty" than anything.]

The film feels uncared for by anybody but the lead actress, but at least she's brilliant, bringing a layer of humor over the proceedings when it needs it, especially in her uncomfortable interactions with young Aurora, and being delightfully, venally evil when it does not. Maleficent is one of the preeminent Bad Guys in all of Western storytelling and Jolie does her magnificent justice.

So overall, the movie is entertaining for what it is - a piece of fluff driven by a woman who was born to play a role. Do I wish the rest of the movie was better? I certainly do. But I'd take Maleficent over Kristen Stewart biting her lip at Chris Hemsworth any day.

TL;DR: Maleficent suffers from massive pacing issues, but is a fun and largely entertaining film thanks entirely to Angelina Jolie's powerhouse performance.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 983