Tag: movie reviews

In 1980, Roger Corman decided to draft off on the massive popularity of Star Wars by producing his own sci-fi epic. He cobbled together a couple million bucks and some recognizable actors and made Battle Beyond the Stars. Since George Lucas drew inspiration for his movie from Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, Corman’s team turned their knockoff of Lucas into a knockoff of Kurosawa as well. But instead of The Hidden Fortress, Battle Beyond the Stars took its cues from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire is Battle Beyond the Stars on a Star Wars budget. (Netflix spent a reported $160+ million on the project, which consists of one four-hour movie split into two parts.) Snyder supposedly conceived it as a pitch for his own Star Wars movie; when that didn’t pan out, he reworked Rebel Moon as its own sci-fi fantasy story. However he hatched the idea, he also blatantly copied the plot of Seven Samurai — or at least the first half of it — for A Child of Fire, which follows a brave woman from a backwater planet as she assembles a team of warriors to defend her home from the menacing forces of the “Motherworld.”

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A Child of Fire runs a little over two hours and absolutely plays like the very long first act of a larger story; the whole thing consists of a convoluted fetch quest to gather these heroes one by one. Each hails from a different moon or space colony with its own distinct aesthetic. One looks like a full-on Kurosawa film; the next mimics a dusty frontier Western; another apes the cyberpunk grunge of Blade Runner, and so on.

Snyder’s craft is evident all these otherworldly locales and their peculiar denizens. (He served as his own cinematographer, and did a pretty good job of it.) The Blade Runner planet introduces a space ronin named Nemesis (Doona Bae) as she does battle with an enormous spider woman (Jena Malone) who uses her spindly legs as massive stabbing weapons — a nightmarish concept that’s very effectively executed. Nemesis and the rest of the mercenaries’ main adversary is a space Nazi named Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who relaxes between bouts of interplanetary genocide by recharging his body via Cronenbergian ports scattered around his torso. Hoses connected to a big receptacle pour some sort of restorative goop into his muscular frame, another really striking sci-fi image.

The constant changes in location, along with all this interesting character and production design, means Rebel Moon is never boring to look at. It’s everything else in Rebel Moon that’s boring. The characters are all generic stock types from other stuff: The mysteriously endowed hero who fell out of the sky (Sofia Boutella’s Kora); the fallen general searching for redemption (Djimon Hounsou’s Titus); the charming smuggler with a heart of gold (Charlie Hunnam), and so on. The actors all look great but bring nothing new or memorable to the table. And just when Kora puts her magnificent seven together, the film abruptly stops.

There are brief flashes of excitement, but Rebel Moon’s pacing is really rough; during the introduction of Kora’s farming colony, there’s a walk-and-talk conversation about grain harvests between Noble and the colony’s leader (Corey Stoll) that feels like it goes on for at least 10 minutes. Do they have a surplus? Do they not have a surplus? When will the harvest be ready? Will they give the Motherworld the surplus? It’s kind of surprising the harvest isn’t done by the end of this endless scene.

The story takes so many digressions, and adds a lot of characters who seem superfluous; presumably some of these elements will feel more important after Rebel Moon — Part Two next year. For now, you just have to take it on faith that the oddly sympathetic Imperial robot Jimmy (voiced by Anthony Hopkins) is hanging around for a reason, because he’s really not in this one. And even with all the pauses for flashbacks to Kora’s tragic backstory, we still don’t know her full motivations for taking up this unwinnable fight after more than two hours of movie.

Again; this will all surely be explained in the second film. But as its own separate experience, Rebel Moon — Part One is deeply unsatisfying. For that reason, if you are interested in it, I think it may be worth waiting until the second film premieres on Netflix in April and you can watch them both as one big marathon viewing.

Any time Snyder ratchets things up into action mode, he immediately ratchets things back down with his now-signature use of relentless slow-motion. As with the rest of Rebel Moon, the results are visually impeccable and dramatically stilted. If you are really into considering the abstract beauty of a clump of sand pinwheeling through the air for 10 seconds, you’ll get all you could possibly want out of this picture. (That happens several times.) If what you prefer in an action setpiece is kinetic excitement or investment in the characters and their goals, this is really not that kind of movie.

Instead, Rebel Moon is the kind of movie that seems overwrought and underbaked all at once. So much care has been given to the style and the design of every little element of the sets, the costumes, and the props; yet so little concern has been given to populating all those background elements with fleshed-out human beings with lives that feel like they exist beyond the edges of Snyder’s immaculately composed frames. (The inevitable Art of Rebel Moon book with all of Snyder’s concept sketches and storyboards will probably be a more satisfying experience than the film itself.)

While I saw Rebel Moon projected in 70mm on a print that had the muted colors and soft details of a print that had been sitting in storage for decades — as if it was a forgotten blockbuster that had been unearthed and re-released — it may actually play better on Netflix. At home, you can half-watch the legitimately impressive visuals while doing chores or looking at your phone. In that context, the fact that the story is cobbled together from countless earlier movies might actually be a plus. If you’ve seen the films Rebel Moon mimics, you’ll be able to follow what’s happening without taking your attention away from folding laundry.

Additional Thoughts:

–Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire is not only an unwieldy title, it’s kind of vague. Who is the “Child of Fire”? I assume Kora, but no one ever refers to her that way — although someone does call her “The Scargiver” (the subtitle of Rebel Moon — Part Two) and at one point she refers to herself as “a child of war.” Did Netflix’s algorithm decide that viewers don’t like war movies and recommend a more flowery alternative?

-By the way: Battle Beyond the Stars kind of outperforms its craven origins, thanks in large part to a script by John Sayles and special effects by an enterprising young filmmaker by the name of James Cameron. It’s currently on Peacock; you may want to check it out.

RATING: 4/10

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro opens with a quote attributed to Leonard Bernstein:

“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

If that’s the definition of a work of art then Maestro … kind of isn’t one? It is handsome, it is well-acted, and its booming orchestral score sounds incredible (not that most people will get to appreciate that streaming the film on Netflix). Yet Maestro does not provoke many questions about Leonard Bernstein — except perhaps wondering why this biography of such an important musical figure of the 20th century devotes so little time and energy to the creation of his music.

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Instead, Cooper — who, in true maestro fashion, not only stars as Bernstein but directs, co-writes, and co-produces the film as well — focuses squarely on the composer and conductor’s relationship with his wife, Felicia, played by Carey Mulligan. For sure, theirs was a complex marriage. When the two first meet at a party in 1946, Bernstein is in a relationship with a man (Matt Bomer). Later, after “Lenny” and Felicia get married, the former resumes his dalliances with men, sometimes in full view of his wife in their own Manhattan home. Maestro considers how Bernstein could commit such betrayals while still harboring such deep feelings of love and admiration for Felicia — and why she would keep his secrets and even to some degree permit them.

Both Cooper and Mulligan adopt high society accents, and during their early courtship they banter back and forth like characters in a screwball comedy directed by Robert Altman. The ups and downs of their marriage are occasionally paused so Bernstein can conduct an orchestra in a performance of glorious, soaring classical music — and when he concludes these concerts he often races off-stage to passionately embrace Felicia, the personal and the public colliding together in an exuberant display of emotions. But little other consideration is given to Bernstein the artist, the composer of symphonies, film scores, and musicals like West Side Story. People tell us about Bernstein’s genius, but beyond those concerts, we don’t really see much of it.

Bernstein may have been known for conducting large groups of musicians, but Maestro is really a duet between Cooper and Mulligan. Few of the other members of the cast make much of an impression. (Sarah Silverman has a few largely inconsequential scenes as Bernstein’s sister Shirley; Maya Hawke appears as the couple’s oldest daughter Jamie.) Although there was a lot of talk prior to the film’s release about its use of prosthetic makeup used to turn Cooper into a middle-aged Jewish man, the end result in Maestro is not distracting — and in fact, the film’s handful of scenes featuring an elderly Bernstein in his final years showcase maybe the most realistic and convincing old man prosthetic makeup I have ever seen in a motion picture.

And that’s just one technically superb aspect of an extremely well-made production, with beautiful black and white and color photography by Matthew Libatique, stylish period costumes by Mark Bridges, and imaginative and dreamlike scene transitions edited by Michelle Tesoro. (The impressive opening sequence seamlessly blends a god’s eye view of a young Bernstein racing out of his apartment to his arrival in Carnegie Hall for his first time conducting the New York Philharmonic, then flies out of the balcony onto the stage and back to Bernstein, all without a visible cut.) When Bernstein’s concerts swell on the soundtrack, the immersive sound design envelops you in wondrous music — provided your home theater is equipped to handle it.

Cooper nails Bernstein’s unique voice and mannerism, and Mulligan brings grace and class to Felicia. When her health takes a turn for the worse in the 1970s, Mulligan (and Cooper) treat her illness with enormous humanity and warmth. This couple’s connection feels authentic and lived in — but I must confess that at a certain point I began to feel like an additional dimension was missing, some sort of tangible connection between Bernstein’s outward persona and his marital stresses, or between his sexuality (and the steps he took to hide it) and his musical output.

What you are left with, then, is a showcase for two very good actors who are very good together, a magnificent score that will probably be great to listen to as a soundtrack album, and some very striking visual moments spread out across two hours. It seems to me that one of the big reasons to make a movie about Leonard Bernstein (i.e. the work) is mostly the stuff Cooper cut out of Maestro — an unorthodox approach that’s ultimately a little frustrating. If that was supposed to be the tension referred to in Maestro’s opening Bernstein quote, then I guess Cooper achieved his goal. If we’re meant to leave the theater (or the Netflix app) haunted by lingering mysteries or ambiguities about Bernstein, then maybe he didn’t.

RATING: 5/10

I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. I don’t do drugs. My vice is food. My wife and I save up so that once or twice a year we can go to an extravagant restaurant and spend a couple hours eating what we hope will be an extravagantly delicious meal. We dream of places like the one documented in exacting, fascinating detail in Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, the latest film from Frederick Wiseman.

At 93, Frederick Wiseman is the grand master of American documentaries. His subjects are often institutions; municipal governments; high schools, public libraries. In a sense, Menus-Plaisirs considers two interconnected institutions: The operation of the three-star Michelin restaurant Le Bois Sans Feuilles in rural France, and the multigenerational dynasty of chefs that run it, including the patriarch, Michel Troisgros, and his sons César and Léo.

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Michel is the elder Troisgros in the kitchen these days, but he is the grandson of another acclaimed French chef, Jean-Baptiste Troisgros. (In between Michel and Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Baptiste’s sons Pierre and Jean — Michel’s father — inherited the family business.) Michel remains the final arbiter in the kitchen at Le Bois Sans Feuilles and the other Troisgros restaurants.

At least for now. We learn in the film that Michel was once on the cutting edge of modern French cuisine. These days, César and Léo are taking increasingly assertive roles in the kitchen; Wiseman observes as try to inject their own bold culinary ideas into the family’s menus. Michel absorbs some of their suggestions and rejects others. (Towards the end of the movie, he says to one “client,” as he calls all the customers at the restaurant, that he has begun to wonder if it is time for him to hand control to his sons.)

A meal at a place like Le Bois Sans Feuilles is supposed to take us away from reality for a little while; to dazzle us with uncommon tastes and smells and sights. We’re not meant to contemplate the time and energy that went into a perfect French cut lamb chop or an aesthetically beautiful stalk of asparagus. Of course, making food that looks effortless requires enormous effort. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is a movie about that effort; about the hours and days and months and years of sweat, thought, choices, and practice required to produce something worthwhile — great food, certainly, but really any work of art.

The work that goes on in kitchens, even extremely high-end ones, is not a secret these days, not to anyone who watches Top Chef or Chef’s Table or one of the countless other cooking shows on cable television and streaming. But those shows — and I watch a lot of them — boil down the process of preparing food to its most exciting and dramatic elements; the pot that spills, the steak that burns, the screaming matches between chefs who both want to use the last burner on the stove.

None of that is present in Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros. Instead, Wiseman shows us four hours of all the stuff that commonly gets cut out of other cooking reality shows and documentaries, the real nitty-gritty process of what it takes to run a restaurant of this caliber. The conceptualizing of dishes. The sourcing of ingredients. The prepping. The tasting. The plating. The serving. (The clients of Le Bois Sans Feuilles sure have a lot of food allergies, and the staff has to be prepared how to work around all of them.)

I suppose one could say that these moments are the fat that other more traditional non-fiction works about cooking trim out to get to “the good stuff.” I would offer that Wiseman is like the chef who knows that you don’t throw away those trimmings; you save them and make a stew. Menus-Plasirs is a glorious stew of ideas and images and conversations. Scene after scene is riveting. One section, where members of the staff visit a facility that makes and ages cheese, could have been an entire movie unto itself for all the fascinating information it contains.

Though I highly doubt Wisemen or anyone else on the crew ever even considered it, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros plays like a four-hour long rebuke to The Menu, the 2022 dark comedy about an ultra-exclusive restaurant not unlike Le Bois Sans Feuilles, the deranged chef who runs it, and the repulsive diners who eat there. Intended as a satire of the haute cuisine world, it instead played like a mean-spirited dismissal of anyone who might derive any pleasure from making or eating great food. The creators of that movie apparently could not conceive of a reason someone might want to eat at this sort of establishment, and seemed to have total disdain for anyone who would. Wiseman offer four hours worth of reasons; because when you have a meal at a place like Le Bois Sans Feuilles you taste all of that work and thought and process in every morsel on every plate.

At four hours, Wiseman’s movie is certainly long. (Wiseman’s movies usually are.) There’s been a lot of complaints lately about long movies. But Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros needs to be long in order to show you all of the work that went into those plates of food. To cut out the trips to the pasture or the dairy farm or the wine cellar, to skip over the part where the waitstaff goes through each table’s substitution requests, would be to miss out on an essential part of the process. And if one of those processes fails, Wiseman suggests, the whole system goes down.

During one of Michel’s many rambling, charming conversations over plates of mouthwatering food, he quips that his grandfather used to say “Cuisine is not the movies.” In Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, though, it is, and in a wonderful way.

RATING: 9/10

People are complicated creatures; they contain many contradictory impulses, emotions, and behaviors. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon aims to capture the contradictions of one such man by being a movie with almost as many different shades as the historical giant at its center. At times, Napoleon is a costume drama. For long stretches, it is a bloody war film. And occasionally — in its best moments — it becomes a sordid and twisted love story about the unbreakable bond between two people: Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and his wife Joséphine, played by Vanessa Kirby.

Talk about complicated creatures. Napoleon first spies Joséphine across the room at a lavish party. It is the late 1790s, and Napoleon has recently been promoted to the rank of general after leading French forces in an inspired attack against the British Navy in Toulon. Joséphine is a widow; her first husband was recently executed during the last days of the Reign of Terror. While Napoleon is instantly smitten, Joséphine seems to regard him with curiosity and perhaps a little amusement; he is a short, haughty man in an elaborate uniform and signature bicorne hat and he will not stop staring at her. It is anything but love at first sight (at least not mutual love at first sight). Still, a marriage to a rising figure in the French military could have its advantages to a widow with children like Joséphine.

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An awkward courtship and wedding soon follow, followed by years of fascinating tensions — romantic, sexual, and plain old you-are-pissing-me-off tension, most of it centered around the fact that as Napoleon ascends to the throne of France and becomes its emperor, he needs a male heir to cement his hold on power. Despite Napoleon’s endless attempts, Joséphine fails to provide him with one.

All of the power dynamics in the relationship flow from there. Napoleon (portrayed by Phoenix in an unusually un-showy performance) desires Joséphine (a gorgeous and enigmatic Kirby) but he needs her too, and the more she resists and teases and fails to get pregnant, the more it infuriates him and turns him on all at once. The pair get into enormous and sometimes hugely petty (and darkly hilarious) arguments. At the height of his frustration with Joséphine’s infertility, he launches into a manic monologue where he threatens her with divorce and proclaims his own greatness. Waving his dinner at his wife while explaining how destiny has chosen him for a great purpose, Napoleon shouts “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!” an instantly iconic line sure to be quoted for years at restaurants that serve lamb.

Napoleon finds Ridley Scott returning to the setting of his very first feature film, 1977’s The Duellists, a historical drama which took place during the Napoleonic Wars. That earlier movie detailed the long rivalry between two French officers played by Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine, who meet and fight over and over through the years. The two pictures are similar in some ways and different in others. For one thing, The Duellists’ entire budget was less than $1 million, which is probably more then Scott spent on just the lavish and ornately detailed period costumes in Napoleon. For another, the Napoleonic Wars in The Duellists were mostly the picturesque backdrop for an intense character story — while in Napoleon, the wars themselves constantly intrude on the more compelling elements of the story, namely the complex connection between the two central figures.

One thing that hasn’t changed about Scott’s depictions of the 19th century: He still doesn’t worry about filling 1815 France with French actors. Napoleon is one of those old-fashioned historical dramas where all of the characters are French and most of the actors are English and speak with English accents. Phoenix uses a slightly more mannered version of his normal speaking voice.

I don’t mind that; I would rather get lost in Phoenix’s brooding work without being distracted by zees and zeys and sacre bleu!s. As solid as Phoenix is, and as bleakly funny as his Napoleon is in moments when he rages against his imagined enemies or displays his staggering inadequacy as a lover, Kirby completely steals the movie from him with her statuesque poise and her pensive silences as she and Napoleon drift apart in the film’s final act.

Scott often treats his movies’ theatrical releases like lucrative test screenings for his eventual director’s cuts; no working filmmaker has reshaped more of their projects into longer (and sometimes radically different) works on home video than him. In the case of Napoleon, Scott has already said that he has a 4.5 hour cut in the works for an eventual release on Apple TV+. At times, this version of Napoleon, which runs a little over 2.5 hours, does play like an incomplete snapshot of a much larger work. Phoenix’s Napoleon arrives into the film as an ambitious young man, but already largely formed; no attention is paid to his childhood, his early years, or where his all-consuming hunger for power came from. Supporting characters drift in and out of his orbit; some are identified by title cards because otherwise the audience would have no idea who these people were or why they are important to the story. Scott never dwells for very long on any of them.

Instead, he spends a fair amount of time on the movie’s battle scenes, which are technically impressive and a bit interchangeable — thematically, if not visually. Certainly it would be very difficult to tell the story of Napoleon without exploring his supposed genius for military strategies and tactics. Scott does find striking ways to illuminate Napoleon’s battlefield prowess; his gift for improvisation and his use of the element of surprise. The film around Phoenix, though, feels far less light on its feet than its subject, especially in these sequences. They are present because they have to be, because inevitably at some point in a movie about this man, he’s going to have to point at the word “WATERLOO” scrawled on a giant map of Europe.

Unfortunately, they don’t really seem to add much to Napoleon beyond that. In fact, whenever Napoleon left Joséphine for yet another long and bloody campaign, I found myself longing for the movie to return to her and their relationship. If Ridley Scott meant for the film to do that in order to give you a glimpse into Napoleon’s own psyche, he succeeded all too well. I credit him with trying to encapsulate an enormous lifein a single, digestible movie, and for bring a lot of unexpected energy to the Napoleon/Joséphine scenes. But I also have to admit that I left the theater feeling like I would be less interested in watching Scott’s longer director’s cut than seeing a streamlined Napoleon that narrowed its focus entirely on the central marriage and its many ups and downs.

RATING: 6/10