For those who are familiar with and love Terrence Malick’s work, I am sorry.
I really couldn’t stand Knight of Cups and all of its “experimental” splendor. To me, it made a concerted effort to be deep and profound, but these profundities were either force fed to us or floated past audiences under the pretenses of art. And I think that was what was frustrating to me, was how Emperor’s New Clothes this movie felt to me. If I didn’t get it, then it was because I’m too crass and unrefined to understand this high art.Read More »
It’s been a while since I last posted a movie review! But it’s been a long while since I’ve seen a movie early enough in theaters that I thought I could still get away with writing a review. (Right now, I only write reviews for films I’m fortunate enough to see early, but please let me know if you’d like reviews for movies I see during their regular theatrical runs.) (And possibly others?)
I was excited to see The Danish Girl because the casting had made quite a splash when it was announced. Eddie Redmayne plays Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener the painter, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Alicia Vikander plays Gerda Wegener, Einar’s wife and a painter by her own right. Einar and Gerda and kind of a beautiful couple, truly and madly in love with each other and trying to have children at the start of the film. While Gerda is struggling to get her portraits shown, her husband’s career is more successful as he shies away from the attention he is beginning to garner in art circles.
At a pivotal point in the film, Gerda asks her husband to put on stockings, shoes, and a dress for a sitting so that she can work on a portrait that her model (a wild child ballet dancer named Oola played by Amber Heard) is late to. At first, Einar puts up little resistance out of his love for his wife, but he hesitates when Gerda asks him to hold up the dress so that she can see how the fabric falls. “Maybe you’ll like it,” she teases.
Einar sitting for Gerda
This is where Eddie Redmayne’s performance starts to shine through. You can see that Einar is visibly changed from the moment he begins to slip on the silk stockings as he looks down and sees, for all intents and purposes, a woman’s legs. There are a lot of closeups on Einar’s face as he grapples with how he feels in women’s clothing and how he feels seeing himself in it. He touches the soft satin of the dress and – for his wife or for himself? – strikes a more feminine pose as Oola walks in. The moment is broken and Einar immediately laughs in embarrassment that Oola has seen him in stockings and holding the dress to his body. She is immensely amused and dubs this feminine Einar “Lily” while giving him a bouquet of lilies.
From this moment, we see Einar gradually becoming more and more comfortable as Lili, and less and less comfortable as Einar. It’s difficult to watch, not only because it’s a difficult period of a person’s life to be intruding upon as she comes to embrace a different gender identity than the one she has been forced into, but also because of how it’s portrayed.
Even as someone who is maybe a bit more social justice-oriented than the average American, I am quite new to transsexual issues. That being said, I am not sure that the fixation on feminizing Einar was the best way to show the character’s shift in identity. There is an entire scene where Einar goes to a peepshow to watch a naked woman touch her body and he mimics her. I understand why these kinds of scenes happened, and I can’t speak on behalf of the trans community, but it seemed a little gratuitous and oversimplified as far as what it means to be a woman. (Although I understand that, for a visual medium, it’s difficult to convey this mental shift without using these borderline-garish visual means.)
Another thing that is difficult to watch is Einar and Gerda’s marriage disintegrate, because their love is very clearly demonstrated to be so beautiful at the start of the film. Obviously, their relationship as husband and wife changes as Einar transition to Lili. It’s so tricky to portray, and I think maybe the film got ambitious with showing this because I think it missed a few beats. I’m not saying that a situation like this is easy to portray, but in The Danish Girl, it seemed to be misisng something. We see how much Einar and Gerda love each other, and can’t keep their hands off each other, and fell for each other at first sight. And when Einar starts to let go of Einar and embrace Lili, we see that she still loves Gerda, even while Gerda really fights Lili replacing her husband. But by the middle of the film, Lili is having illicit rendezvous with a man (Henrik, played by the adorable Ben Whishaw), and by the end of the film, she is telling Gerda how she wishes to marry a man someday and have children.
Lili and Gerda having a difficult conversation
I really struggled to believe Lili being this callous toward Einar’s wife. Was there such a strong divide between Lili and Einar that Lili did not love Gerda the way Einar did? It didn’t seem that way in the middle of the film; it seemed that Lili did still care for Gerda deeply. But maybe she didn’t love Gerda? It didn’t make a lot of sense, especially given what Lili would say in public about marriage and how much she valued it, and I think this may have to do with just how gender identity itself doesn’t often make a lot of sense. But it was painful to see how Gerda had to suffer in a very different way from how Lili was suffering. And I’m glad that the movie did not try to minimize Gerda’s suffering and only focus on how Lili alone suffered through her transition.
Also interesting is how Gerda has to deal with this transition herself. Her career as a painter is only able to take off because of her paintings of Lili. (“It takes the right subject matter to make an artist great.” – very roughly paraphrased) So it’s interesting to see her treat Lili as this amazing person who helps her create amazing art, but also for her to deal with the conflict that by having Lili, she does not have her husband. But her love persists throughout the entire film, even though when it’s difficult for Gerda. It’s very tough to watch and to show, and I think that’s really honest.
I do like how they also showed Lili’s struggle with medical professionals, most of whom diagnosed Einar with perversions or a series of other mental illnesses. It is implied with her first doctor’s visit that Lili may be intersex, as she has stomach cramps every month. (It has not been confirmed if Lili Elbe was intersex in real life.) However, that first doctor subjected Lili to painful radiation therapy that did not cure her ailments. It’s difficult, then, for Lili to trust Dr. Warnekros (played by Sebastian Koch), her last resort to seek medical treatment. Only Dr. Warnekros believes in Lili’s gender identity as valid, and rather than trying to cure “Einar’s perversion”, tries to help Lili exist in the world as a woman.
(Again, though, I don’t love how Lili and Dr. Warnekros use terms like “real woman” at times. For example, Lili expresses a desire to have a baby, “like a real woman”. I’m not saying it was wrong, but it was hard for me to understand what Lili thought of herself as a woman and maybe that was the point; that Lili herself was not yet sure that her identity as a woman was valid.)
The scoring by Alexandre Desplat was also great. Desplat frequently does a wonderful job of creating very emotional film scores and this was no exception. The only thing more powerful than Desplat’s moving scores were the very pronounced awkward silences that filled the gaps. The soft color palette of the film was also pretty key in highlighting, then, the brighter colors of Lili, for example, who was never comfortable being in public as Einar but was so comfortable being in her red lips and beautiful gowns. Really great work by the set designers in tandem with the cinematographers, truly.
I cried a lot watching this movie, and I’m really happy to see Hollywood begin to tell these stories that really need to be told. I’m expecting to see a lot of The Danish Girl in the upcoming movie awards season. (Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander already have several – well-deserved – nominations including ones for the Golden Globes.)
This isn’t a great family movie. There is a scene where you see, erm… a lot of Eddie Redmayne. And if you are uncomfortable with seeing a male actor in women’s clothing and makeup, you will definitely be uncomfortable watching this movie. And if you’re kind of salty about Eddie Redmayne being a more beautiful man and more beautiful woman than you are, prepare to be salty while watching this movie. But it’s a good film to see, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Because these are stories you should know. This is suffering you should be aware of.
And it’s a gorgeous movie.
The Danish Girl has been on limited release since November 27, 2015 in the United States.
This was not a good movie. It pains me to say this because I have a friend who worked on it (the visual effects were great, B!) but oh boy.
Okay, now that I’ve blurted out my thesis, it’s time to back it up.
First of all, is anyone surprised? When my friend Annie told me she had early screening tickets on Wednesday, I had no clue what she was going on about and very vaguely knew that it was a movie at all. Something something… fantasy or sci-fi genre? Am I out of the loop or did it seem like there was very minimal promotion going on for this? (Not a rhetorical question, it is entirely likely that I just was never targeted for advertising for this movie.)
I am assuming that all the actors in this film were really well-paid because ugh, it was just awful. I really take issue with the writing. The dialogue made me roll my eyes into the back of my head and the plot points were so loosely tied together. The movie itself was pretty short, which was great for me because that meant I didn’t have to endure it for more than 2 hours. But maybe they could have used some extra time to build the world here? World building is crucial and I will never excuse any book, movie, TV show, etc. that doesn’t take care to do it. I mean, there’s a scene where we are looking at a tombstone. It says “REBEKKA” backwards. Is this the script of this grand world? Mirrored English? That was one of the worst offenses, that they made such a laughably barely-half-arsed attempt at the world-building. This is a movie based on a book series, the world-building is done! You just have to put it in the movie!
You know what’s worse than a movie with an all-white cast?
A movie where the only people of color are the secondary villains who have zero character development and are killed off. Djimon Honsou is in this and it’s such a shame that his talent is wasted here. There was an Asian secondary villain who doesn’t have any freaking lines before he is killed. Do not even get me started on the black female secondary villain who takes the form of a leopard. She is reduced to an animal much more than the other villains, and the Asian one was a bear chained in a cage for most of his scene, so that’s telling. And of course, she has no lines. At least Djimon Honsou had lines.
I cringed during most of Jeff Bridges’ and Julianne Moore’s scenes. I think I cringed most watching Julianne Moore play this poorly developed villain. I couldn’t help think of her standing in front of a green screen pretending to wield magic while she has been nominated for an Oscar for the fifth time. I’ll go more into how I think her character fell completely flat later, but just… know there was a lot of putting my head in my hands in the middle of the theater. I don’t blame her at all. She did the best she could with what she was given… but she was given baloney.
Jeff Bridges, the Oscar-winning actor, may have known this was all ridiculous. He uses this strange affect when he speaks in this movie, like if Sean Connery was trying to play Gandalf. Maybe his character is supposed to be a kind of washed up old fool, but it was still very sad to see him like this. I’d like to think that he knew this whole movie was ludicrous and was just having fun while getting paid.
Ben Barnes actually did a pretty good job. I’m not familiar with his work (sorry Prince Caspian fans) but you know what, he looked good in this role and I think he delivered. Not sure why his character was the only one with any real depth but okay then. I’d watch more movies with him after seeing Seventh Son.
If you’re familiar with my reviews, you might know that I care deeply about world-building and relationship-building. The relationships between characters bond us to them more than their actions independent of other people. The relationships in this movie were almost all BS. There’s, obviously, a love story and it’s completely limp. It drives much of the plot ending forward and I was so detached from it that I was really disgusted. Two attractive actors with some on-screen chemistry does not a love story make! The only maybe compelling relationship, to me, was of Tom Ward (our protagonist) and his mother. His mother was a pretty cool character, played by Olivia Williams, and I maybe felt most attached to her. But maybe that’s just because it’s easy to write maternal traits without having to do much else.
I mean… I have so many negative things to say here. A waste of Kit Harington, who is only in the movie for the first 10 minutes, sorry to all his fans. A waste of admittedly, as I said early, really nice visual effects to create magic and mythical beasts. A waste of what seems like it was a really cool world. This story is just empty and flat and I had no reason to care about it. I was so uninvested in the characters, in the story, about 5 minutes into the movie. Spoiler alert: Gregory locks away Mother Malkin and she escapes because “time made her stronger” and that is the impetus for our conflict? That after enough time passed, she could just leave her prison? As soon as this happened, and Julianne Moore was introduced in just an utterly tragic costume, I knew this movie was worse than I thought it would be going into this screening.
I’m just going to show you the trailer now, I guess. More ranting afterwards.
Oh, where do I start with Birdman. It was so different, so bold, so ambitious, but it pulled off what it was looking to achieve so perfectly.
The thought I had consistently throughout this film was how meta it is. The film was a really thoughtful satire about acting, theater, Hollywood, critics, Michael Keaton’s career, and more. Extremely self-aware, extremely reflective. So good.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but one of my favorite things about this film was how it played with audience expectations. I’ll talk more about it after the trailer, but let me tease you by saying it reminded me of Magritte. This movie was so introspective that it made me think of surrealist art. My friends and I left the theater feeling like we had left one of our humanities seminars in college.
First of all, it stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thompson, a washed up actor who previously found fame starring in comic book superhero films “Birdman”. You did hear me mention that this film satirizes Michael Keaton’s acting career, right? Maybe it would have been a more subtle satire if they had cast a different actor, but it was so perfect with Keaton playing the role himself. (For those not in the know, Michael Keaton is most famous for playing Batman in Tim Burton’s films Batman and Batman Returns.) The movie mirrors his career very closely; at one point, he cites how the last Birdman movie he did was in 1992, which is the year that Batman Returns was released.
Michael Keaton is great. What a stupendous performance. I really know him best from Beetlejuice, actually, but this has really opened my eyes to Michael Keaton as an actor. Amazing comeback performance. He delivers so simply but deliberately. Just excellent work on his part.
I loved this movie stylistically. The pseudo-one-take style made for really great transitions that I was a big fan of. One criticism is that the shakiness of the camerawork would get distracting. It really lent an indie film feeling to it, not really in a good way. It would seem amateurish at times, to have tight shots that were wavering over an actor’s face.
But speaking of these tight shots, I really appreciated the emphasis on the actors’ monologues in this. Combined with the seamless cinematography, the monologues added to the theater feeling of this movie, which I found refreshing. How often do you watch a movie that feels a bit like watching a play? Even when Hollywood adapts plays for films, you lose that. I loved this.
I also have to really commend Edward Norton. I haven’t seen a film of his in a long while and this performance is pretty different from the ones I’ve seen in the past. He plays Mike Shiner, a diva stage actor who is incapable of much else but acting. I forgot how much I love watching Edward Norton. He is the secondary protagonist, I would argue, for this film. While he is the source of most of the comic moments in the film, there’s this darkness in his character that we see slowly being resolved over the course of the movie. This is the kind of role that makes you an Edward Norton fan, trust me.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu did a great job and I appreciated many of his little deliberate touches. For example, in the opening shot, we see a brief glimpse – maybe a one-second cutaway – of jellyfish on the beach. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t have know what it was or you would have missed it completely. By the end of the movie, we know what this moment was, it is significant. Little things like this are so pleasing to me in movies, tying little ends together at the beginning and end of a film.
I got to attend a screening of Inherent Vice thanks to Cloture Club this past Wednesday. (It had a limited release late last year and will have a wider release today.)
I didn’t know too much about the movie going into it. I’d only just started seeing some trailers and commercials, and they didn’t tell me much about the actual story. (Much like how I felt about the Interstellar promotions.) (ALSO I’m going to talk about Interstellar soon. If I don’t, bug me about it.) The initial impression I got from this was a very American Hustle-esque vibe of nostalgia for an older time with some investigative hijinks? Also, check out that cast list, it is not to be trifled with. We have an awards-season gunner here.
Going into the movie, I suspected it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. I mean, here’s the description I was given before the screening:
“Inherent Vice” is the seventh feature from Paul Thomas Anderson and the first ever film adaption of a Thomas Pynchon novel. When private eye Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a looney bin…well, easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic `60s and paranoia is running the day and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” that’s being way too overused – except this one usually leads to trouble. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists… Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp – all Thomas Pynchon.
Are you confused? I sure was.
And to be honest, I was still confused coming out of the movie. One thing I will say off the bat is that Paul Thomas Anderson did a really wonderful job of transporting us back to that late 60s/early 70s time in American life. It’s not only the obvious costuming and set design, but the camera work and the editing. Lots of tight angles, a nostalgic grainyness… if you had not seen a movie in the last 40 years, this movie would seem very familiar stylistically to you. In one of the opening shots, we see Katherine Waterson, who plays Shasta Fey, looking so incredibly mod and the stylizing of the shot makes her look even more authentically mod.
This still is brighter and clearer than this scene was in the film.
Joaquin Phoenix delivers a great performance, as usual. He is also rocking some really incredible sideburns.
Them muttonchops put Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to shame.
Also, for fans of Walk the Line, we see Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon reunited.
This morning… with her… having coffee…
Before I attempt to talk about the plot (which I really barely understood…), I’ll just go over some thoughts:
Do not see this movie with your family unless your family has a special bond that allows you to see a movie with a lot of nudity, sex, and excessive use of the phrase “pu**y eater”. (I mean it.)
There is also a lot of drug use in this movie. It’s important to the plot and the themes of the film, but not important enough to warrant how much it’s mentioned or shown in the film.
The movie is narrated by Sortilège, a chracter who is in the film as one of Doc’s friends but otherwise… serves no real on-screen purpose? Unless I’m missing something? I don’t know why there was a need for her to be this on-screen character who is a friend to Doc for about 5 minutes total of the film. She was a good narrator, don’t get me wrong, but having her be an on-screen character confused me a bit. I think it was meant to make her seem like part of the story, but she was maybe the only character who had just nothing to do with any of the interwoven storylines.
Owen Wilson always plays Owen Wilson. I would like to see him challenge himself as an actor to not play Owen Wilson.
Also, you will get certain cravings in this movie:
Pizza
Fudgesicle (which actually turns out to be a frozen chocolate-covered banana)
Frozen chocolate-covered banana
Pancakes
All in all, this movie wasn’t really for me. At all. I would compare it to Burn After Reading. If you liked that, you’ll likely enjoy this. It has a similarly nonsensical, all-over-the-place plot, and even a similar theme of paranoia. Not my cup of tea, as I said before.
That being said, there were a few shining moments for me. Some very random moments that were just really funny, very randomly emotional moments. It wasn’t a complete waste on me, but I just walked out of the theater not sure how everything started, ended, or what was really going on in between. It felt like just as the weirdness had plateaued, something else crazy would happen. Again, I am sure this was intentional but it’s not something I personally enjoy in movies.
This trailer actually includes most of my favorite moments from the movie:
Sip of Starrshine 