OVP: Rocketman (2019)

Film: Rocketman (2019)
Stars: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard, Gemma Jones
Director: Dexter Fletcher
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Song-"(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again"*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I cannot stress how much I hated Bohemian Rhapsody last year.  Months after seeing it, and watching it win a bushel of undeserved Oscars, it still haunts me as one of the truly worst movies ever to win an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (had it won, which I think it was dangerously close to doing considering that Roma seems to have never been properly in the conversation last year), it would have been the worst film to take the trophy, and it might be the nadir of a rush of musical biopics in recent years that will surely become a tidal wave after seeing the box office off of this treatment of Freddie Mercury's life.

(Spoilers Ahead) It is impossible not to bring up Bohemian Rhapsody in relation to Rocketman.  After all, coming just a year after the Queen flick, this is also a movie about a 70's rock god's struggle with money, drugs, and his sexuality; hell, both films have John Reid being played by a different actor from Game of Thrones (in Bohemian Rhapsody it's Aiden Gillen, here it's Richard Madden).  The films are similar in motif, and occasionally in terms of actual content.  Both struggle with how to break out from the mold of what we've come to expect from a musical biopic: a rags-to-riches tale of a genius talent who hits it big, skids, and then either recovers (in the case of John) or eventually succumbs to some of his demons (in the case of Mercury).  The biggest difference is that Rocketman occasionally works in its attempts to step out, having it rise from the complete failure of Bohemian Rhapsody (even though I'd argue that neither movie is all that good).

Rocketman's saving grace is surely that it is trying to be a proper musical, not just having John himself sing, but other side characters tackle his biggest hits in musical montages.  In this way, it kind of transfers from being a cliched musical biopic, but does still veer into a stage cliche-the jukebox musical.  This works when it's fun-Egerton as John is the best part of the movie (it's embarrassing how much better he is compared to Malek's Mercury), giving a glibness to John that was lacking in the two-dimensional Freddie.  The side characters are more hit-and-miss, with something like Bryce Dallas Howard's to-the-rafters take on John's mother being hopelessly indulgent, while Jamie Bell (so good so often these days) does much more with Bernie Taupin.

And lest we forget, the film does in fact have a sex life.  For the first time in a mainstream, Hollywood film of this magnitude, we see two men doing it (Madden & Egerton), and there's nothing cruel or condescending about the act.  Honestly, in what is a nice moment in a world that is too filled with hate, I sat there looking at the entire straight audience I was with, and not anyone batted an eye or looked away as the two hotties got it on.  There was even a lot of knowing chuckles when the impossibly handsome Madden came into the studio in a tailored suit, and Egerton's John got flabbergasted & visibly horny.  These moments of whimsy, with an actor as charming as Egerton, were by-far the bets parts of the movie.  They just aren't enough to ultimately make it a winner.

The film in its back half becomes hackneyed and cliched.  It's better than Bohemian Rhapsody in every conceivable way, but that shouldn't confuse this with being a meaningful or strong film-it's just that the bar bore a whole in the floor it was so easy to cross.  Still, Rocketman has some fun & wit about it, even if it can't rise above a genre that just doesn't have room for originality, despite profiling some of the most creative people of the 20th Century.

OVP: Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Film: Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Stars: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, John Benjamin Hickey, Paul Walker, John Slattery, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell
Director: Clint Eastwood
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Mixing, Sound Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I've been thinking this weekend a lot about Clint Eastwood.  Later this week we'll be doing a post as a tribute to him and his latest accomplishment (Sully, which I'm still on the fence about seeing but will probably succumb to later this week if I'm on vacation and I feel like I need to get out and catch a movie).  That being said, today the thinking about Eastwood is, because of this vacation and wanting a fresh batch of Netflix discs to bring with me on the plane, quite present to something I'm actually experiencing as I am attempting to see in the same day Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima as I move steadily through the remaining 2006 Oscar Viewing Project titles (wait-you're curious where the writeups for 2007 and 2014 are when I've got 2006 nearly wrapped up?  I'm getting there-and also you're mean).  Anyway, let's dive into this as it ain't gonna be pretty as you can clearly see from the ranking.

(Spoilers Ahead) I'm not entirely sure what it was in 2006 that kept me from seeing this film.  I know for Letters I actually relented because I was going to be doing my film reviews for the Oscars (I was a writer on my school paper at the time), but the projector at the movie theater burned out and so I somehow managed to miss seeing the most recent Best Picture I have yet to see.  But Flags, I'm not sure.  I was in the heat of seeing at least one movie a week, and on-paper it had a lot of things that appealed to me: prestige topic, cute guys, Oscar buzz.  But I'm guessing that was around the time that my eye-rolling toward Clint Eastwood's pictures hit its zenith which kept me on-the-fence about spending my very limited resources on such a film.

In the years preceding and in a couple of years since, I've had some about-faces on Eastwood's works, even some that I disliked at the time, but I am not what you'd call an obvious fan.  I like Eastwood just fine as an actor and I'm pretty much over what some of his political standings are (I think with entertainers you largely have to dismiss those that you disagree with and be lucky when there's ones you actually share political beliefs with, as it gets too arduous to always find those who vote the same way you do), but his directorial style always feels a bit hackneyed.  I've been scared for years to revisit something like Unforgiven, which I still think is his only unqualified masterpiece for fear that the years of under-edited biopics will have dulled my love of it, but while there are moments in his other films that have been strong (and I have high hopes for Letters), that western opus is his only truly great picture.

Flags indulges the things that I hate most about Eastwood's movies.  The camerawork, even in scenes of broad daylight, are coated in a rough darkness that is hard to watch and practically makes you squint (I shouldn't have to put on my glasses if your film doesn't have subtitles).  The characters are drawn in such broad strokes that morality can never really be a factor-who can cheer against even the worst of these men?  The battle scenes are compelling, but nothing we haven't seen in hundreds of other movies and quite frankly nothing here approaches what Spielberg was able to accomplish in Saving Private Ryan.  The film is at least twenty minutes too long, and doesn't establish any of the side characters enough, which is a pity considering he went to the point of hiring people who can, you know, actually act like Melanie Lynskey, Benjamin Walker, and Jamie Bell.

It's also a pity because what is usually the saving grace of an Eastwood picture, his role as a true actor's director, isn't found here as the acting is miserably bad.  While others in his films have had his directorial indulgences, they've been saved by world-class talent like Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, and even Eastwood himself coming in and finding the humanity that he's attempting to achieve.  Here, though, the three male leads are all abysmal.  Jesse Bradford probably comes across the best since he  can find some charm in his character.  Ryan Phillippe, then still a relatively hot commodity, looks pretty but has nothing else but vacant emoting to contribute to the conversation (and what was with all of the guys getting half-naked and wrestling at the end of the film, as if Eastwood thought a nod to the hotness of his cast was going to save him from lusty critics).  Worst of all is Adam Beach, giving some of the worst acting I've seen in a major motion picture in a while.  Beach overplays every scene, badly, finding nothing but a hollowness in what is clearly the most interesting character in the film on-paper.  Beach has always had trouble with finding subtleties in his character (I know this from seeing pretty much every SVU he's ever starred in), but this is horrendously bad.  If there was any hope of saving this movie through acting, Eastwood cast the wrong guys in the lead.

All-iin-all, then, it was just an abysmal movie.  It scored two gimme nominations for the Oscars (the two sound categories), and while that is an understandable nomination, it isn't really necessary.  Even here the sounds aren't as clean as you'd expect from a war film (especially in the crowd scenes not on the battlefield), the music carries you in-and-out with too much regularity, and there's nothing special to warrant Oscar attention other than the Oscar-winner whose name is on the director's chair.  A pow is a pow is a pow, as it were.  I get it, but since the Academy was already headed toward Letters, was there really a need to go here too?  Well I'll find out in about twenty minutes when I start that picture.  In the meantime, share your thoughts-what did you think of Flags of Our Fathers?

OVP: Defiance (2008)

Film: Defiance (2008)
Stars: Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, George MacKay, Alexa Davalos, Mark Feuerstein, Mia Wasikowska
Director: Edward Zwick
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Not all important subjects mean we get important movies, I think is a lesson we learn nearly every single year at the cinema.  Each year there's a number of films, some where critics are in on the joke (The Monuments Men) some where they sadly aren't (The Imitation Game) where a big, serious topic is brought to screen with absolutely no life in it.  We get neutered versions of real-life human beings and only a smattering of story about a person who deserved better.  This was surely true for the Bielski brothers, a band of four men that lived in a forest in Belarus during World War II, saving hundreds of Jews from the concentration camps.  What should have been a dramatic and fascinating look at survival instead became a cookie cutter, hyper-masculine, and boring movie that lacks any sort of style or individual stamp.

(Spoilers Ahead, though this is real life so, you know, you should know the spoilers) The film, as I stated above, is about the Bielski brothers, a group of men whose parents are killed by the Germans during World War II.  The four brothers vow revenge and head into the forest, where they are joined increasingly by a number of Jewish refugees.  The eldest brother Tuvia (Craig) finds himself at odds with his younger brother Zus (Schreiber), as Zus wants to take a more militant approach to the Germans and to surrounding farms (willing to kill for food), while Tuvia doesn't like the risk.  Zus eventually abandons them to join a Russian military group while Tuvia fights it out in the forest.  After a rough winter, the two are reconnected when the Germans are attacking (it's one of those "all is lost" moments where the cavalry comes charging in like we're in an old John Ford western).  The film ends with stories of what happened to the brothers after the war.

The story is pretty paint-by-numbers even if living it clearly was a harrowing experience.  I don't know why we didn't get more into the behind-the-scenes of the camp style sequences as a result.  We see little outside of the brothers, who are obviously in a weird position of power in the camp as they are the ones making most decisions and who frequently are on the military frontline (they're also the movie stars, so we know that they won't be dying, at least not until the end of the film).  I would have loved to have learned more about, say Mark Feuerstein's intellectual and what he thought of the warring brothers, or about any of the women (there's a recurring commentary about "forest brides" that becomes a little hippie commune that would have been fascinating to learn more about).  Women in this film, it's worth noting are treated particularly appallingly by the screenwriters.  Basically the only women that remotely get any interest from the writers or director are women that might sleep with one of the brothers.  I don't blame the women for wanting to sleep with them (Jamie Bell, y'all!), but this sort of derivative treatment of women is appalling.  It might be the 1940's in the movie, but it's 21st Century when you're making it.  Try and tell a bit of these women's stories that doesn't involve wanting one of the Bielski brothers.

The performances are not great, it's also worth noting.  I'm starting to realize that I don't really like Liev Schreiber as an actor.  His accent is thick and fine, but the rest of the performance is too calculated, constantly trying to "be in the moment" of a scene without creating the moment, and his character becomes too easy to spot in terms of anger and not letting the script (which is great) do its job.  Craig isn't much better.  I generally like his James Bond, but he finds no shading in his main character.  Jamie Bell is the actor I like the most of these three, and occasionally it feels like he might be doing something interesting (balancing hormones, anger, resentment, and two brothers with completely opposite world views, he might be the most promising character), but the script abandons him after his wedding to a then-unknown Mia Wasikowska, and we're left with the huffing of Craig and Schreiber instead.

The film received one Oscar nomination, which was for Best Score, and while I get it and James Newton Howard is an Academy favorite, of course, I think they could have tried harder.  There's nothing iconic here-this could easily be any number of other Newton Howard scores, and while it's very pretty, you should expect more than just pretty from an Oscar-nominated score.

Overall I left bored and felt bad that this is probably the definitive story of the Bielskis.  What were your thoughts on this movie?  Were you like me and wanting more?  Do you also find yourself wondering how directors can turn exciting stories into boring ones?  Which Bielski brother/actor is your favorite?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Snowpiercer (2014)

Film: Snowpiercer (2014)
Stars: Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Ewen Bremner, Go Ah-sung, John Hurt, Ed Harris
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Sometimes I watch independent films and wonder precisely why a major studio passed on this film.  This was certainly the case with Snowpiercer, a film I caught on DVD recently.  While watching it and its crazy, action-packed story, I couldn't help but wonder why precisely this film wasn't amongst this past summer's blockbuster pictures (and I don't mean that in a bad way).  It had a compelling but easy-to-follow narrative, a series of stunning visuals, name brand actors (I mean, if Captain America can't open a movie...), and very specific Science Fiction elements.  Put Christopher Nolan's name on this particular movie and you'd make half a billion dollars.  The fact that it disappeared with nary a thought earlier this year in American cinemas is one of several baffling questions posed by this film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in 2031, seventeen years after an attempt to counteract global warming reacts disastrously with the earth's atmosphere, causing the entire planet to be in an ice age that largely makes all life on earth extinct.  The only living human beings on the planet are those on a train that, every single year, goes on a track that circumnavigates the globe.

Like so many cloistered societies (both cinematically and in real life), a caste system evolves that manipulates and mistreats those in the rear of the car.  They are treated like vermin, and eventually their leader Curtis (Evans) decides it is time to revolt.  Armed with his best friend Edgar (Bell) and a woman whose son was kidnapped by the elites of the ship (Spencer), they begin to push forward through the cars, trying to find the mystical conductor of the train Wilford (Harris).

The film is weirdly wonderful, and at its best when it's world-creating.  The concept of the train is fantastic, and I loved the way that every box in the train sort of had its own personality.  It sort of pushes the envelope on what you think you need to survive (some of these people have lived in a 100-foot radius for their entire life).  It also shows what happens when you impose horrible conditions on human beings-eventually a revolt will rise, and absolute power, while not necessarily corrupt, eventually becomes rusty and complacent.

The movie has strong performances across-the-board, though no one comes close to what Tilda Swinton is doing as Minister Mason.  Swinton, who has been on rapid-fire ever since she won her Oscar for Michael Clayton seven years ago, is epicly good in this movie.  I loved the way that she clearly is weak-willed, totally reliant upon others for her power, and yet there's something almost inhuman about her.  She's totally given herself over to Wilford, whom she may never have even met (I can't recall this, but it's very likely that she hasn't), and doesn't seem to have a legitimate question about her actions.  Like so many in a dictatorship, she doesn't question whether something is right or wrong, but just accepts that it's her job and that's a cover for it in the future.

The film has some serious logistical issues, it must be said.  If you give any sort of rational scientific thought to most of the things that are happening on the train you'd realize that, for example, the train has to go over oceans that were filled with water when the train was created or that the train would have to be going obscenely slow to only circle the planet once a year or, and this is the kicker about the ending, human beings will have to have more than two people to continue the species into the future (everyone dies in the end except for a young boy and a teenage girl, and they are forced out into the cold where they see a polar bear, which is supposed to signify life returning outside of the train though I don't know how long that life will survive with a hungry polar bear nearby).

The film also could have been longer, honestly (I know this was a bone of contention with Harvey Weinstein, but any edits were probably unnecessary as world-building takes time), and I think that may have fleshed out a bit more of the actual logistics of the train.  The acting is uniformly good, as I already mentioned, and I kind of liked the lack of proper character development outside of Curtis and Wilford, as it was easier to find your audience proxies in the railway car.  It also makes you value people as human beings-this is the end of the human race on that train, and frequently we see the bizarre spilling of very valuable life on the train and wonder how much longer this situation can sustain itself.  It's a movie that lends itself to multiple viewings, looking for clues to what has just happened you're so overwhelmed by the details (an Art Direction nomination would be most wise), and that's just what I'm looking for in a summer blockbuster.

While sadly the Weinsteins foolishly put it in limited release rather than creating what could have been a monster hit, you can and should still catch it on Netflix.  For those of you who have seen it, do you agree that this is a giant hit that got away?  What did you think of the craziness that Tilda Swinton brought to her role?  And was the polar bear a sign of hope or a sign that humanity was about to become breakfast?  Share in the comments!