The Danish Girl

Released:  November 27^th, 2015

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Focus Features

Starring:  Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ben Whishaw, Amber Heard

Directed by:  Tom Hooper

Written by:  Lucinda Coxon

Personal Bias Alert:  loves Vikander, haven’t read the book

6.8 of 10

            Welcome to your stuffy British Oscar bait!  You’d be hard-pressed to make a film more tailored for awards season than The Danish Girl, which has the distributor, topical storyline, and pedigree to make its run blindfolded.  In a way, that appears to be what it’s doing, as after a rousing premiere at the Venice Film Festival it stumbled in Toronto and has been limping along ever since.  But it’s still got foolproof nominations for Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander, who’s strategically running in the supporting category, and remains in consideration for several other categories.  That’s the power of perception for you, because taken on its own accord, The Danish Girl deserves little more than a polite nod as you leave the theater.

            That topical storyline has to do with the growing prominence of transgendered people in Western media.  The Danish Girl draws upon the story of one of the first people to ever get sex reassignment surgery, the artist Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe (Redmayne).  I say draws upon because this story plays very loose with the facts, an easy freedom that isn’t inherently negative, but unfortunately wasn’t used here to form a well-structured movie.

            The Danish Girl is adapted from the novel of the same name, which I’m assuming is where the focus on the relationship between Einar and has wife, Gerda Wegener (Vikander), comes from.  It’s an excellent plan to root the story in the universally relatable situation of loving someone who’s changing before your eyes, and the pairing of such emotive actors as Redmayne and Vikander really allows that story to take off.  They play off of each other so well, vivaciously bubbly when they’re in love and misty-eyed when in rough patches, that the complexities of their ever-changing relationship is remarkably easy to track.

            The problem is that screenwriter Lucinda Coxon doesn’t match this relationship’s emotional arc to the plot’s structure, allowing the turning point in the relationship to come far too early and for the same dynamics to drag along for long stretches of time.  The plot itself becomes very bogged down in the physical aspects of Einar/Lili’s transition, from the adoption of feminine movements to the surgeries themselves.  This is understandable considering that her physical transformation is what she’s remembered for, but this doesn’t bear much emotional heft on its own.  By not pairing the plot’s climax to the couple’s relationship, the back half of this film becomes remarkably dispassionate, and its ending feels like nothing more than a rote bid for tears.

            Director Tom Hooper has a certain self-aggrandizing tone that he uses as his de facto mode of storytelling, which has led to two straight Best Picture nominations and certainly produces austerely beautiful films.  The Danish Girl proves to be no exception, as everything from the score, sets, costumes, and cinematography is impeccably done.  His framing of shots have often resembled posed paintings, which fits nicely with the galleries and workshops much of this film takes place in.  Stills from this movie would look lovely framed and hanging on a wall, but this style matches poorly with the film’s uneven emotional resonance, so much so that when the couple’s relationship ebbs from time to time, the film becomes very flat.  Hooper does nothing to address the story’s shortcomings, apparently feeling that a nice presentation was all the screenplay needed, which indicates a massive failure to understand the story he was tasked with telling.

              Thank god for Redmayne and Vikander, who prove to be the only ones capable of injecting some life into these stiff proceedings.  It’s encouraging that, for all of The Danish Girl’s Oscar maneuverings, the two people who truly delivered at their jobs are the only ones assured of its golden recognition.

Other Notes:

Ø  Ben Whishaw and Matthias Schoenaerts give solid, if stiff, supporting turns.

Ø  Whishaw may be one of the few people to have appeared in more films than Vikander in 2015.

Ø  I adore the way this film shows people painting through the back side of the canvas.

In the Heart of the Sea

Released:  December 11^th, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Warner Bros.

Starring:  Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson

Directed by:  Ron Howard

Written by:  Charles Leavitt

Personal Bias Alert:  never read Moby-Dick, likes man-versus-nature themes

5.3 of 10

            Walking through the local movie theater a few months ago, I spotted a poster for In the Heart of the Sea.  It’s a great poster, using the massiveness of the whale to emphasize the futility of men, and then I noticed that it listed the old March release date.  The film was delayed for nine months, allegedly to position it for an awards season run, but few people bought that explanation.  It originally would’ve competed with the releases of Cinderella and Run All Night, while it’s new December slot had it up against zero wide releases.  A stinker was suspected, and the long wait soured many, like me, who were intrigued by this film.  Now it’s finally out in the world, and while it’s not a complete travesty, it does blow a solid premise and a strong cast.

            In the Heart of the Sea endeavors to tell the real-life inspiration for Moby-Dick, where the crew of the whaling ship Essex is attacked and stranded by a massive white whale.  There’s no one here to call Ishmael, but the storyteller role remains, taken over by the grizzled and haunted Thomas (Brendan Gleeson) who was the cabin boy on the ill-fated trip.  Novelist Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) drags the story out of him, and what unravels is a tale of many, but unfortunately incohesive, sides.

            Charles Leavitt gets the lone screenwriter credit here, but story credits also go to the writing duo of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver.  Leavitt’s spotty track record includes the excellent Blood Diamond and the terrible Seventh Son, while Jaffa and Silver have collaborated on blockbusters like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Jurassic World.  That’s not a particularly strong team, and they clearly struggled with the cumbersome, sprawling nature of this story.  There’s a lot of characters to set up as well as the unfamiliar business of whale hunting, and then they needed to condense what is a very long story into a manageable size.  They never seem to land on how to do any of this, as characters are paper-thin but made to have unsatisfying arcs (á la Jurassic World) and the story is allowed to plod on far longer than is needed (á la Seventh Son).  To add to the messiness, there’s a part of the film that tries to take on the myriad of themes that run through the story, but there’s also clearly a pull to make this into an action film (there’s a moment where Chris Hemsworth jumps at the whale with a hatchet).  This overall disjointedness nearly ruins what should be an epic tale, one that Melville himself was able to form into an American classic.

            Luckily for the audience, even when the story struggles there’s always a top-shelf actor onscreen to make it sort of work.  Hemsworth leads the group, and even though his accent is a bit shaky, his shoulders and acting ability are more than broad enough to carry the load.  He, Benjamin Walker, and Cillian Murphy make a nice threesome as the ship’s leaders, and they smooth out some of the dark turns that the film takes.  Tom Holland plays the younger version of Gleeson, and he yet again proves to be a young actor worth watching.  But it’s the scenes back on land with Gleeson and Whishaw that pop the most, proving yet again that masterfully played conversations can be more riveting than CGI spectacles.

            And there is a lot of CGI in this thing, as everything from the whales they are hunting to the backdrop behind the characters is digitally rendered in a strangely obvious way.  It’s the kind of film where the real things feel more palpable and set apart from those that aren’t, and it’s such a pervasive feeling that it’s hard to determine whether it was intentional or not.  Director Ron Howard would be the man to ask, and whether you find this effect and his constantly moving camera beautiful or a bit annoying will be dependent on your personal taste  It certainly makes it impossible to forget that you’re watching a movie, and while it does lead to a few impressive shots, that doesn’t make up for how jarring it often is.

            In the Heart of the Sea had a tough legacy to live up to, both from the history of its story and from the talent involved in its production.  It’s disappointing that it is such a long, jumbled mess, but there’s still bright spots peppered into this long slog.  Then again, it’s kind of fitting that the filmmaker’s attempt to make an epic out of the story behind Moby-Dick ended up as their white whale.

Other Notes:

Ø  Warning:  this film contains unnecessary whale gore.

Ø  As good of a job as Hemsworth did, I still feel that he was miscast.  He’s just too lumbering and imposing of a figure to be in the cramped spaces of a boat.

Ø  Is it possible for Frank Dillane not to feel smarmy?

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Released:  November 13^th, 1993

Rated:  PG

Distributor:  Buena Vista International

Starring:  Danny Elfman, Chris Sarandon, Catherine O’Hara, William Hickey

Directed by:  Henry Selick

Written by:  Tim Burton, Michael McDowell, Caroline Thompson

Personal Bias Alert:  doesn’t like stop-motion animation, lukewarm on Tim Burton

4 of 10

            The Nightmare Before Christmas should be one of my classics.  I was the perfect age when it came out, was drawn to dark kids fare, and was already steeped in Burton’s style.  But Nightmare slipped through the cracks to become one of those films I always knew of but never saw.  Now over twenty years later, the film seems to have lost its magic.  Perhaps replication has made it seem less original, perhaps I’m just too old, or perhaps (just perhaps) it has always been too lightweight to hold up its own reputation.

            In a world where each holiday has its own isolated town, Halloween’s frightful leader Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon and Danny Elfman) finds himself tired of celebrating the same holiday every year.  While wandering the woods in misery, he comes across Christmas Town and is enchanted by its bright cheer.  Jack brings tidings of Christmas back to Halloween Town and endeavors to lead his newfound holiday the following year, but when his fear-loving townsfolk struggle to grasp the concept, Jack must somehow morph ghoulish ghosts into spry elves.

            It’s a silly plot, but to be fair, it is intended for very young children.  In this case, silly is fine, but lightweight is not.  So little happens in Nightmare that its brief runtime feels stretched tight.  It plays out with the intentional clunkiness of a TV special and lacks drive or stakes.  It falls prey to the idea that little kids can’t handle narrative menace, and it’s a much lesser and slightly patronizing film for it.  Consider Disney’s landmark Beauty and the Beast, released just two years before Nightmare.  This film presents kids with the prospect of being separated from your parents, bullied by a monster, and loosing forever the people that you love.  Nightmare has a potentially messed up Christmas and a bored protagonist.  See the difference?  How are children, let alone the adults being drug along with them, supposed to get invested in this story?

            As is often the answer with Tim Burton products, it’s the off-kilter, gothic style that’s supposed to reel you in.  The beauty of the film can’t be denied, even when you’re looking at worm-ridden monsters.  Burton and company designed a few truly memorable creatures here, from the lanky Jack to his pincushion admirer, which are all just the right amount of creepy.  Surrounding them are elaborate, misshapen buildings that you can imagine creaking and swaying in the wind.  Halloween Town is so perfectly themed that it’s a shock when things briefly switch to Christmas Town, with its popping colors and twinkling light.  It shows that the production team was capable of so much variety, which makes Halloween Town’s rigidly Tim Burton style a bit disappointing.  The entire look is replicated in past and future projects, the awe of which is diminished by so much repetition.  It’s still beautiful, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not enough to support an entire film.

            Filling out the scant plot is a bunch of supposedly peppy musical numbers composed by longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman.  While the songs have their moments, they’re filled with repetitive and semi-lazy lyrics.   Sentiments are reworded ad nauseam, and it’s not uncommon to hear nonsense phrases just because they rhyme.  The accompanying music is often pretty bare-bones, so if you’re not into the zany words, then the numbers will do little to brew your excitement.  Couple that with a ridiculously undercooked romance, and the film offers little else besides surface entertainment.

            Burton had Nightmare cooking in his brain for nearly ten years before the film went into production.  It seems to have been a passion project for the man, and perhaps because of that there’s little effort to make it appeal to a wider audience.  You’ll either be charmed by his style or you won’t, because there’s little other reason to watch this film.

Other Notes:

Ø  I’ve long been slightly creeped out by stop-motion animation.  Everything appears lifeless to me, and I have great difficulty connecting to any story told with this method.

Ø  Note that this film is Tim Burton’s baby, but he did not direct it.  He was too busy at the time with Batman Returns and Ed Wood.

Ø  The scientific method joke made me laugh out loud.  Poor Jack, it never sways public opinion.

Krampus

Released:  December 4^th, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Universal Pictures

Starring:  Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Allison Tolman, Conchata Ferrel, Emjay Anthony

Directed by:  Michael Dougherty

Written by:  Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields

Personal Bias Alert:  was lukewarm on Dougherty’s Trick r’ Treat, likes genre blending

7.3 of 10

            Christmas horror movies have been made before, but they’re generally intended for B-movie or hard genre fanatics.  Ask the average moviegoer to name a few and you’ll likely get:  “Gremlins!  And, uh…”  The conversation won’t last long, because gleeful gore and Christmas tidings just don’t seem to go together.  It’s a balance that Krampus struggles to get right, but the effort, and Universal’s confident marketing push, is a risk to be admired.

            Director/co-writer Michael Dougherty is mining a very similar well here as his previous film, Trick r’ Treat.  Both are about an impish creature punishing those who don’t take the holidays seriously.  Perhaps they’re part of a loose series, or perhaps Dougherty just wants us to keep our holidays more reverent.  Christmas, it turns out, already had a creepy monster in its lore, which should come as no surprise considering how old and mixed its traditions are.   The character of Krampus is described in a nifty story within a story as “the shadow of Santa”, bringing carnage to those who lose the holiday spirit.  He’s inadvertently summoned by the central family’s youngest son, Max (Emjay Anthony), after becoming disillusioned by his family’s bickering.  Holiday-themed horror ensues, but not without a lot of winks at the audience, because the whole thing is knowingly a bit ridiculous.

            How much leeway that gives the film is going to vary for everyone, and its charm relies on having lots of room to slip up.  The film is, in many ways, a mess.  Its characters are obnoxious stereotypes, its sentimentality seems tacked on, and it settles for scares instead of terror.  There’s also a nasty anti-middle America streak that’s hard to get over (I know lots of nice people who like hot dogs and mac n’ cheese), and yet it overcomes all of this because it’s so darn gleeful.  The love that seeps through this film for oddball horror and kitschy bad guys is effervescent, and the tone weirdly fits with Christmas’s garish traditions.  It’s genuinely fun to watch this family get terrorized, and even though you don’t want to see them die, you do want to see what craziness gets thrown at them next.

            Between this and the anthology-based Trick r’ Treat, Dougherty proves to have a varied and imaginative take on his monsters.  Both films send all sorts of creepy-crawlies after their victims, and while they’re based on horror staples like clowns, children, and ancient demons, there’s always a twist to take things up a notch.  Either due to budget constraints or personal taste, Dougherty relies mostly on practical effects, working with Weta Workshop to create some very memorable monsters that any Planet Hollywood should proudly display.  Krampus himself is introduced in a rather memorable scene, and even if he never proves to be as terrifying as his introduction implies, he’s still a noteworthy baddie in the annals of PG-13 horror.

            Krampus, for all its odd mixing, never does anything truly original.  It holds very tight to clichés, but the gleeful way it goes about its story will earn it many laughs and cheers.  The ending is a letdown, that’s all I’ll say, but it’s a big one considering how assured it had been up until that point.  Still, there are so many worth-while moments that its flaws become overwhelmed, leaving audiences with an appetite for more holiday carnage should Dougherty choose to continue his series.

Other Notes:

Ø  It’s not lost on me how difficult it must’ve been for the entire cast to hit the same note tone-wise.  Kudos all around.

Ø  Without spoiling it, there’s a plot point early on that I was terrified that they would renege on.  Thankfully, they don’t.

Ø  The score in this film is inventive and near-perfect.

Ø  And so the legend of ‘the noodle incident’ is expanded.

Happy Christmas

Released:  July 25^th, 2014

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Magnolia Pictures

Starring:  Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, Lena Dunham, Joe Swanberg, Mark Webber

Directed by:  Joe Swanberg

Written by:  Joe Swanberg

Personal Bias Alert:  hit-and-miss on mumblecore, likes Anna Kendrick

7 of 10

            Mumblecore is quietly becoming one of the biggest filmmaking movements in America, but its founders reject that there’s any organization involved.  Instead, they surmise that the characteristic low-budget, organic feel is a natural response to mainstream cinema’s swelling budgets and rote stories.  Many of the founders are already making forays into bigger pictures, with Lynn Shelton, Mark Duplass, and Joe Swanberg attracting a variety of mainstream actors to their projects.  Despite this shift, Swanberg has chosen to keep his budgets low and with Happy Christmas reverts back to a micro-budget style (the film was made for a reported $70,000) after maxing out at $1 million for Drinking Buddies.  How this is possible with a cast that includes Anna Kendrick, Lena Dunham, and Melanie Lynskey is a mystery, but it’s one that you won’t bother to consider when watching the thoroughly enjoyable Happy Christmas.

            As a hallmark of the subgenre, the film is largely improvised, leaving the plot to be a loose, shaggy thing that doesn’t go anywhere drastic.  There’s a 30ish couple (Swanberg and Lynskey) with a young baby and a couch-surfing little sister (Kendrick) in need of a restart.  There’s hints early on of animosity that never quite blossoms.  Instead, the film circles around a story of familial love and responsibility that is worth the pain.  It’s a gentle conflict, but one that most people will recognize.  It’s refreshing, given the histrionics that come with most films about families, to find one that captures the calmness of day-to-day operations.  There’s annoyance and frustration, yes, but there’s also an affectionate history and a bond that runs too deep to break.

            Another easy cliché that the film manages to avoid is pigeonholing Kendrick’s Jenny as a good-for-nothing slacker.  She’s troubled and there’s hints that she’s rebounding from a bad relationship, but she’s also genuinely interested in her brother and sister-in-law’s life, not wanting to interrupt it for too long.  Kendrick plays her as someone smart enough to know that she’s intruding, and her attempts to make herself useful is what staves off animosity.  These efforts lead to a sweet relationship between Kendrick and Lynskey, one that feels genuine and is wonderfully navigated by the two actresses.  They make it feel as if they wander into the understatedly powerful moments that occur between these two characters, and given the genre, perhaps that’s what actually happened.

            However, the style sometimes gets in the way, as almost all of the moments when Happy Christmas stumbles can be traced back to its mumblecore tenets.  The aesthetic simply isn’t for everyone, and the low-fi camerawork, lighting, and sound design doesn’t make for an elegant film.  More coverage shots would give the film some energy, and the lackadaisical plot inevitably leads to some inconsequential scenes.  There’s a sense that Swanberg wasn’t out to make a perfect film but to capture some small moments that aren’t often observed.  This is something he does quite well, but it doesn’t make for a complete film.

            Despite its shortcomings, Happy Christmas is carried across the finish line on the backs of Kendrick and Lynskey.  Everything about the film quickly fades from your mind except a few raw and wholly recognizable moments between these two.  If that is truly all that Swanberg wanted to capture, then the mission was accomplished.

Other Notes

Ø  Here’s hoping that Lynskey gets more starring roles.

Ø  I’ve never taken to Lena Dunham, even here.

Ø  Fun fact:  the baby is played by Swanberg’s real-life daughter.