Tag: Laura Dern

Wilson (2017, Craig Johnson)

From the start, Wilson’s got two problems it can’t possibly overcome. First, director Johnson. He’s never got a decent idea. Not with the actors, not with the composition, not with the pacing. He does seem to understand Laura Dern’s far and away the best thing in the movie, but he doesn’t address compensating for her not being around sometimes.

The second problem is lead Woody Harrelson. He’s Wilson, an old curmudgeon who loves his dog. He inserts himself into people’s personal space to ask invasive questions and just generally be a prick because he’s a white guy, so he’s always gotten away with it. Harrelson will have a comeuppance of sorts, but the film never addresses how that comeuppance affects him or how it manifests in the everyday.

Harrelson’s usually okay. He’s never good. He’s not better in the Dern scenes because Dern’s so awesome it carries over. He’s got no great third-act character arc to bring things around for the finale. Just to get it over with: the third act’s a disaster. When Wilson is good—which is before Cheryl Hines shows up as Dern’s sister in an intentionally unlikable stunt cameo—it’s good enough to make up for the clunky first act. Screenwriter Daniel Clowes, adapting his own graphic novel, stumbles through the entire first act, doing narrative pratfalls and showing off how read mediums can have superior structuring. Though Johnson’s direction is also blah.

And Harrelson’s not making it compelling.

The movie starts with Harrelson’s best friend, Brett Gelman, announcing he’s moving away. I was wondering how the movie was going to deal with Harrelson having such an obvious chemistry vacuum with Gelman’s wife, played by Mary Lynn Rajskub. But they disappear, so it doesn’t matter. Harrelson only ever has to do character development with Dern and Isabella Amara. Amara is the daughter Dern gave away for adoption. Further into the second act than it ever should, Wilson becomes about their mutated take on the nuclear family.

All three characters will have profound arcs.

The film will ignore all of them. It will vaguely acknowledge them, though the solution to all of Amara’s problems seem to just be “don’t be goth,” whereas the movie doesn’t ever get specific with Harrelson or Dern’s exact problems. Like, Harrelson’s got some definite problems at a few points in the movie, but they’re taking on his overarching character development arc in the third act, kind of invalidating the second act for the audience. We just sat through this better movie and now the worse movie tells us it was all for naught.

The copout with Amara and Dern can just be chalked up to “the mystery of women.” Trying to explain them would require adjusting the narrative distance to encompass their points of view. Not going to happen in Wilson, even though Johnson seems to be leaning into Harrelson coming off like a serial killer in the first act, stalking his prey.

The other technicals are all just okay—Frederick Elmes’s photography, and Paul Zucker’s editing. Whoever okayed Ethan Tobman’s entire production design concept should have made better decisions. Jon Brion’s music initially seems like it’s going to bring something to the film.

It does not, though no one really brings anything special except Dern, who’s so great when the film lets her be, which isn’t often.

The rest disappoints.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022, Colin Trevorrow)

It’s not hard to pinpoint what’s wrong with Jurassic World Dominion, the inglorious (hopefully) end of a twenty-nine-year-old franchise. Director Trevorrow does a bad job directing, he and co-writer Emily Carmichael do a bottom-of-the-barrel job with the script, the actors all seem contractually bound and miserable (even the new additions, with one exception), and Michael Giacchino’s musical score is so terrible they should’ve stopped payment on the check. Otherwise, Dominion would be fine. Just needs a better director, an entirely different story and script, and—I don’t know—the music from the original Jurassic Park SEGA Genesis game instead of Giacchino.

The film opens with a news break, which Trevorrow and Carmichael are incapable of writing. Dominion’s what happens when blockbusters don’t even need to hire script doctors so they don’t embarrass themselves. Trevorrow’s only positive quality is his dogged determination in not letting each horrifyingly embarrassing moment of film slow him from reaching the next. Dominion’s third act is nowhere near as bad as it could be, but the first and second acts—all two endless hours of them—are crashing behind it and the debris distracts from the film at least not getting any worse. Except for Giacchino’s music. Giacchino’s music always gets worse, right into the credits.

Jasmine Chiu plays the newscaster. She wouldn’t be believable as a TikToker on “CSI: Sheboygan,” so introducing twenty-nine years of cloned dinosaur backstory is out of the question. Especially since her news report also sets up this movie’s villain—and the only person who seems like he’s having a good time—Campbell Scott. Scott’s playing a character from the first Jurassic Park, but the part’s recast (for good reasons). Now, Scott’s got a lousy part. He’s playing the not-so-smart head of a genetics company; they’re using prehistoric DNA to cure diseases and create monster bugs. The monster bugs are important. If Trevorrow were any good, there’d be a great Godzilla 1985 reference. But he’s not any good. Instead of an on-point Godzilla bug reference, there are desperate Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Jaws references like Trevorrow’s still sucking up to executive producer Steven Spielberg.

But Trevorrow directs Scott like he’s doing an incompetent, megalomaniac hipster Steve Jobs. It’s a string of terrible decisions and Scott’s willingness to commit to the bit and somehow get through. He’s never good; it’s impossible, with Carmichael and Trevorrow’s lousy script, for anyone to actually be good, but he’s never boring, bored, or defeated.

Everyone else goes through those emotions, though no one more despondently than Chris Pratt. He’s fifth fiddle in his own franchise, but he doesn’t even care. He’s got one good scene, and it’s from Congo. The rest of the time, he looks like he’s trying to disappear, similar to Bryce Dallas Howard.

Laura Dern and Sam Neill work pretty hard to make their parts work. Either Trevorrow didn’t direct them, or he told them to play their characters exactly the same as they did thirty years ago, only Neill doesn’t have the same American accent anymore. It’s a better accent, but it’s a different one. They get some genuinely terrible dialogue but get through all right.

Also back is Jeff Goldblum, who doesn’t get very much to do, even when he’s around. The second half of the movie is about putting the Jurassic World characters together with the Jurassic Park characters to they can fight the Thanosaurus at the end. Goldblum’s around, but it’s like Trevorrow and Carmichael are scared to write him. Goldblum seems ready to work but never gets asked to do any.

Isabella Sermon plays a cloned human who’s supposedly important to the monster bug plot. It’s all nonsense. Sermon’s fine, but fine in the way you’re being nice about a middling child actor. She was in the last movie.

Then BD Wong’s back, of course. He’s shockingly good in a silly role.

New characters this movie—besides Campbell (sort of)—are pilot DeWanda Wise and lackey Mamoudou Athie. The film would be an excellent showcase for both actors if Trevorrow weren’t terrible. But, instead, he flops with both. More with Wise because she’s got more to do—she and Pratt are chemistry-free action buddies. Athie’s just around for various exposition dumps and plot contrivances, but he’s not bad doing them.

Technically, Dominion’s fine. Good CGI. Good photography from John Schwartzman. Not good editing from Mark Sanger, but he’s working from Trevorrow’s footage, set to Giacchino’s music. There’s no way to edit Dominion into a good movie with those quality sinkholes.

Despite teaming up two generations of Jurassic adventurers, Dominion’s a bad, boring, anti-trip down memory lane. Even when Trevorrow’s aping old Park moments, they’re just so desperate they don’t get the nostalgia going; instead, they just further embarrass this entry.

All set to Giacchino’s godawful music, of course.

Little Women (2019, Greta Gerwig)

Little Women has two parallel timelines. There’s the present, starting in post-Civil War New York City with teacher and pulp writer Saoirse Ronan living in boarding house (where she also teaches). Then it flashes back to Ronan’s life seven years earlier, at home in rural Massachusetts; she’s the second oldest of four sisters; oldest is Emma Watson, youngest is Eliza Scanlen, Florence Pugh is second-youngest. Pugh sees Ronan as an adversary for the world’s attention while Ronan might see Pugh as annoyance but often doesn’t see her at all. For the first half of the film, the flashbacks are steady. We meet mom Laura Dern, who volunteers all her time to help the war effort, the husband and father off in the (Union) Army, the girls fending for themselves as far as attention goes.

Ronan’s always been the writer—writing plays for them to act out—Watson’s the actor, Pugh’s the painter, Scanlen’s the musician. The flashbacks reveal how these talents flourished during the home front days. At a party, Ronan meets the new neighbor, similarly aged Timothée Chalamet, newly orphaned and now living with his grandfather, rich guy Chris Cooper. Chalamet and Ronan are both socially awkward wallflowers but extroverted ones, so they immediately hit it off. And through Chalamet, the families reconnect and become good friends, with Cooper opening his house to the sisters, offering to share in the intellectual wealth. There are books for Ronan, paintings for Pugh, a piano for Scanlen… and James Norton for Watson.

Norton is Chalamet’s tutor, penniless and just the right kind of dreamy for Watson.

Of course, seeing them meet and gently fall in love comes in a different context thanks to director (and screenwriter) Gerwig’s bifurcated narrative. We’ve seen their less than glamorous present—in fact, when they marry and move into the same house we’ve seen in the future… it’s a bittersweet moment. Watson’s the one sister with the express dream of having a family and while Ronan can still write, Pugh can still paint, Watson’s getting frustrated. So her flashbacks have the shadow of the future cast against them, which really neatly resolves in an echo in the third act, but still… it’s rough seeing her dreams stalling.

Pugh’s also giving up on her dreams in the present, deciding she’s only ever going to be an excellent painter and never a genius, even though she agrees with Chalamet the all-male academy in charge of assigning genius is severely wanting. The film’s got a lot of discussions about a woman’s potential, but the ones between Pugh and Chalamet are striking, maybe because the most we know abut Chalamet to start is Ronan’s going to turn down a marriage proposal someday. Even as the film—in the present—discusses events in the past, Gerwig never goes so far as to promise they’re going to get played out onscreen. So when the film actually does the marriage proposal flashback and it cuts through Chalamet and Ronan; even though we’ve spent most of the film with them past this trauma, it’s even sharper, even bloodier, for knowing the characters better. For having seen them develop to this point and then past it.

Little Women’s flashback device is fairly singular. It’s not a piece where the story is in the flashback (but it’s also not one where the story isn’t in the flashback), it’s not a piece where the protagonist drifts between; in fact, once you realize what’s going on in the present, the film checking in with anyone besides Ronan is mildly unwelcome. There’s nothing good waiting in the present for anyone it seems, whereas the past is full of laughter, music, dancing, celebration. But the flashbacks also aren’t for happy moments, the present for the sad. And even when the correspond with one another, even when Gerwig’s doing it for best effect, they’re not for echoing either. Gerwig’s an exceptionally “hands off” director as far as style goes, she never tries to show up the unfolding production; every choice furthers the film as a whole. The flashbacks and the present compliment one another for the film’s sake, which isn’t even the same thing as for the characters’ sake. Ronan and Pugh in the present get character studies while Watson gets some of one in the past, but Gerwig uses that approach to further things later on. Ronan and Pugh’s adversarial relationship exists mostly in the characters’ (and viewers’) perceptions. The tight focus on the actors in the first act and half means later on, when Gerwig’s got a lot more group-based, epical action to deal with, Ronan, Pugh, and Watson have a lot more inherent heft.

Meanwhile Scanlen, grown up watching her sisters and seeing their hopes and dreams rise and fall, has wisdom, just not the wisdom her sisters need (or know they need) because it’s all very messy. Of the four sisters, Scanlen is the one with the most obvious possibility for her talent. The stage isn’t in Watson’s cards because she’s too middle class, Pugh and Ronan have major obstacles in any pursuit to get paid for their artistic talents, but Scanlen’s piano playing seems within the realm of possibility. Not too lofty a dream for a young woman in the late nineteenth century.

All of the sisters, in one way or another, are acutely aware of their situations. Watson knows marrying penniless but dreamy Norton means hard work and a hard life. Ronan and Pugh both know a woman’s best potential from rich aunt Meryl Streep, who revels in crushing her nieces’ artistic dreams with the hard facts about what a woman can and cannot do. Well, she revels in it initially, but once Streep gets talking about the situation, the mean-spiritedness fades fast, as she hears the terrible words she’s speaking. The best any of the sisters can hope for is Pugh marrying a rich man who’ll let her take care of them all, including parents Dern and Bob Odenkirk. When we finally get to see Streep and Odenkirk together, after she’s spent the film running him down, is a fantastic moment; Gerwig’s able to get in emotional gut punches thanks to the flashback structure, but she’s also able reverse it and fill the moments with joy.

The film’s constant isn’t joy, however, not on its own. It’s anger. And maybe joy in spite of anger. Maybe at the start of the second act, in flashback, Dern has a talk with Ronan about how Dern—who we’ve seen as a homemaking saint to this point—has a secret no one has ever guessed. Well, except maybe Streep. She lives in a constant state of anger at the world, at the unfairness of it, the evil in it, and refuses to let it better her.

At this moment, Dern frankly becomes the most interesting performance in the entire film. She and Ronan are phenomenal together and Ronan’s great, Pugh’s great, Chalamet’s excellent, but when Dern’s in a scene, you watch Dern. You want to understand how Dern is getting through this moment. But also Ronan. Ronan’s inherited the blinding anger and works to quell it, which—again thanks to the structure—informs all her scenes previous to the conversation with Dern… including the present day ones. The flashbacks inform on the characters in the present, sort of bake in textures in real-time, but with Ronan, it’s like she gets an additional two layers of depth with the wave of a wand or flick of a fountain pen. It’s awesome.

Because even with—I think dazzling is the about the only appropriately enthusiastic adjective—even with dazzling performances from Pugh, Chalamet, Dern, Streep, and excellent ones from Watson, Scanlen, Cooper, it’s Ronan’s film. Gerwig gives her this big silent acting moment, when what plays across Ronan’s face is what Little Women leaves its audience with, it’s all about Ronan. And her anger and her joy. And what she does with both of them. It’s a breathtaking finale, with the film’s perfect score (by Alexandre Desplat) accompanying. Even though she’s adapting an oft-adapted novel, Gerwig pushes the ending until it’s right for the adaptation, collapsing flashback and flash forward, dream and reality, until it can hinge solely on Ronan’s expressions as she reacts to the culminating moment.

And Gerwig and Ronan nail it because of course they do. The last thirty minutes of Little Women, if it didn’t bombard the emotions, tugging and shoving between happy angry sobs and sad angry sobs—I’m not even sure why I was crying at the very end, though I know Desplat didn’t help—the last thirty minutes would be a victory lap. Just due to the nature of the plot, Gerwig’s hardest “sell” comes at the end of the second act, beginning of the third. So when she and the film are able to keep climbing instead of just sailing to the finish, it’s glorious. And sad. And joyous. And sad.

It’s spectacular work. Everything technical is outstanding—Gerwig’s direction, Yorick Le Saux’s photography, Nick Houy’s editing, Desplat’s music, Jess Gonchor’s production design is breathtaking; Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are superlative. Little Women looks—and sounds (not just the score, the sound editing is great)—amazing.

I mean, it’s capital, obviously.

The Good Time Girls (2017, Courtney Hoffman)

The most disconcerting thing about The Good Time Girls is the dialogue. The short opens with this solid, distinct narration from Laura Dern. Director (and writer) Hoffman goes for lyrical shots but not visuals; Autumn Durald’s photography isn’t dull so much as shallow… to the point you wonder if the filters were just set wrong in post-production. But Dern’s narration carries it. Right up until the action moves into the remote brothel.

Hoffman’s shots outside, even with contrary photography, are all precisely composed. Inside, not so much. Especially not since it opens with all the women sitting around listening to one sing a song on a banjo. And then Hoffman’s lack of performance direction starts to become clear. No one really looks like they’ve ever sat and listened to her play her banjo before. Pretty soon Q’orianka Kilcher takes a drag off a cigarette and it doesn’t seem like she’s ever smoked a cigarette before. All that attention to visual outside, it doesn’t come inside.

Turns out Dern and some of the girls are actually in the brothel to exact vengeance on some brothel regulars. The madam, Dana Gourrier (who gets terrible dialogue, but the performance is painful), is an accomplice but not invested in it.

Dern’s okay. Mostly. More when she’s acting opposite Garret Dillahunt, as the lead bad guy. Everyone else needs more direction. Even Alia Shawkat, who at first seems like she doesn’t, but then has this banter thing going on and it’s a fail. Extreme long shot banter.

Hoffman’s timing is off in just about every scene. Good Time Girls drags and is only about thirteen minutes of actual movie. There are long credits. Also the various visual homages to Westerns play incongruous. They distract, which is both good and bad. The film initially implies it’s going to be really dark, but then there are various relief valves throughout and it avoids verisimilitude for anachronistic comic relief.

Maybe if it all added up, the thin script, the exceptionally problematic interior direction, and the shaky performances wouldn’t matter. But it doesn’t. It just wastes Dern’s narration.

A Perfect World (1993, Clint Eastwood)

A Perfect World runs almost two hours and twenty minutes (it does with end credits). The last act of the film is a seventeen or so minute showdown in real time. Until that point in the film, John Lee Hancock’s script flirts with occasional sequences in real time, but there’s a lot of summary, a lot of missed time. The present action of the film is a couple days–Kevin Costner has broken out of jail, ends up with an eight year-old boy as a hostage (T.J. Lowther), and is trying to get out of Texas. Clint Eastwood, acting, plays the Texas Ranger after him. There’s a great attention to detail, particularly for the time period, and with the filmmaking; A Perfect World is a great example of a film being good while still boring.

Hancock’s script desperately wants to compare and contrast the various characters–Eastwood had run ins with younger Costner, Costner had a bad dad, Lowther has a bad dad, it goes on and on. Laura Dern is around to be sexually threatened–the film takes place in 1963, after all–and to counsel Eastwood. Unfortunately, most of that counseling comes when Eastwood’s Rangers are literally broken down off the highway.

Meanwhile, Costner and Lowther have a rather touching adventure. There’s great period music, rich performances from just about anyone–even evil escaped convict Keith Szarabajka is pretty good and he’s not doing much of anything. Leo Burmester doesn’t get enough to do, however. Once things come together for the inevitable showdown, which Eastwood and Hancock don’t set up well enough–one would think Eastwood’s chasing Costner across a county, not the state–there get to be hints of what A Perfect World could have done. It just takes too long to get there and not through interesting enough adventures.

Costner’s too much of an enigma to be the lead, Lowther could be but he isn’t. Same goes for Dern (or Eastwood even). It isn’t a matter of Hancock’s script being all over the place, it’s about the script not being there enough and Eastwood being able to cover it as a director. Jack N. Green’s photography is gorgeous, Joel Cox and Ron Spang’s editing is spry; A Perfect World is a spectacularly well-made, often spectacularly acted film, just not spectacular overall. But it’s still really darn good.

3/4★★★

CREDITS

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by John Lee Hancock; director of photography, Jack N. Green; edited by Joel Cox and Ron Spang; music by Lennie Niehaus; production designer, Henry Bumstead; produced by Eastwood, Mark Johnson and David Valdes; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Kevin Costner (Butch), T.J. Lowther (Phillip), Clint Eastwood (Red Garnett), Laura Dern (Sally Gerber), Keith Szarabajka (Terry Pugh), Bradley Whitford (Bobby Lee), Leo Burmester (Tom Adler) and Jennifer Griffin (Gladys Perry).

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The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson)

It would be wrong to call The Master a self-indulgent masterpiece, as it’s not a masterpiece (except maybe for Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s photography and Mark Bridges’s costumes… oh, and the sound design) but it’s also not self-indulgent. Anderson shows no personality until the end credits, when he sends shouts out to family members. Well, I guess that inclusion does qualify as self-indulgent (or worse).

The Master actually isn’t easy to talk about. There’s a purple elephant in the room as far as a twist and I don’t want to give it away. Not to say I want anyone else to suffer through the film–and especially not the end credits–but it’d just be mean. I will say Anderson does blatantly rip off a rather famous line from Midnight Run. It’s for one of Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s scenes. Their scenes are usually pretty good. Hoffman’s absolutely wonderful in the film. His performance doesn’t make up for the rest of it, but he does distract from it.

As for Phoenix, it’s hard to say. Anderson’s got him limping, got him walking around with a distinctive hands-on-his-hips look, got him talking with a jaw injury… And I haven’t even mentioned Phoenix looking forty-five but playing a guy in his mid-to-late twenties.

Amy Adams has the next biggest part. She’s so affected, Phoenix looks like he’s giving a natural performance.

The Master‘s a bloated mess of self-important, faux profundity.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; director of photography, Mihai Malaimare Jr.; edited by Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty; music by Jonny Greenwood; production designers, David Crank and Jack Fisk; produced by Anderson, Megan Ellison, Daniel Lupi and JoAnne Sellar; released by The Weinstein Company.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix (Freddie Quell), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Lancaster Dodd), Amy Adams (Peggy Dodd), Laura Dern (Helen Sullivan), Ambyr Childers (Elizabeth Dodd), Jesse Plemons (Val Dodd), Rami Malek (Clark), Lena Endre (Mrs. Solstad), Madisen Beaty (Doris Solstad) and Kevin J. O’Connor (Bill William).

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Jurassic Park (1993, Steven Spielberg)

Two big things I noticed about Jurassic Park. First, it’s still a superior use of CG. It really shows how digital effects do not get better with technology or budget or whatever; being used by a good filmmaker makes all the difference.

And Spielberg does a fine job with Jurassic Park. It’s an incredibly impersonal film, which the second thing I noticed really showcases. Sam Neill’s protagonist is so shallow, even Bob Peck’s character—who gets no back story—comes off deeper. Some of the problem is with Neill’s performance. He can’t keep his American accent—in fact, at the beginning it seems like he’s supposed to be Australian, but then he starts suppressing it, only to then let it come through. Laura Dern’s character is even more shallow, but she manages to make the character work with her performance. Neill gets better towards the end, when he finally stops whining about not liking kids.

Once the film gets going, it has a fantastic pace. Spielberg’s direction is strongest here in that regard—he knows how to make the film work and does; he also knows how to get good performances out of almost all the cast. Neill isn’t really his fault.

Besides Peck, Jeff Goldblum, Martin Ferrero and Samuel L. Jackson are standouts. Richard Attenborough teeters between endearing and good. He sells his most important scene.

The John Williams score is excellent, the Dean Cundey photography is good (but not singular).

Jurassic Park’s a fine, pseudo-smart popcorn movie.