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Posts Tagged ‘Jamie Bell’

“ALL OF US STRANGERS”: Madness of love

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 1, 2024| 1 Comment »

Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott

“ALL OF US STRANGERS” My rating: B+ (Hulu)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s just about impossible to describe Andrew Haigh’s deeply moving “All of Us Strangers” without either giving away the film’s big reveal or making it sound like a half-baked dive into armchair psychology.

Yet “…Strangers” got under my skin unlike any other film of 2023. It’s a downer…but we walk away from its all-consuming sadness with filled with hope for our capacity for love.

Andrew Scott, the “hot priest” of “Fleabag,” stars as Adam, a lonely writer living in a London high-rise so recently opened that there’s hardly anyone else in the building.

One fellow resident who does catch his eye is Harry (Paul Mescal); they spot each other during a fire drill and Harry almost  immediately shows up at Adam’s door with a bottle and a too-eager desire to be let in.

Nothing immediately comes of Harry’s advances (both men are gay), but over the course of the next week the two strike up a relationship that moves quickly from the physical to the romantic.

Meanwhile the screenplay by Haigh (adapting Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers) tosses a head scratcher into the mix. 

One day Adam boards a train and gets off in a suburb where he is reunited with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy)…an impossibility since (a) Mom and Dad appear to be the same age as their son and (b) we have already learned from Adam’s conversations with Harry that his parents died in a car crash when he was a young teen.

Jamie Bell, Andrew Scott, Claire Foy

What’s happening?  Well, apparently Adam has constructed a fantasy world in which he can receive the parental love denied him in reality. In this world he can touch and be touched. He can reveal to his parents his homosexuality (Dad is cool with it; Mom is  a bit slower to get on board).  He can take comfort in the warmth of his boyhood home.

Obviously Mom and Dad don’t exist anywhere but in Adam’s head. Yet so spectacularly convincing is Scott, so quietly desperate is his need for affection, that we end up buying into his delusion. And as delusions go, this one is pretty damn seductive.

At the same time the Adam/Harry relationship is deepening…at one point Adam takes his new boyfriend out to meet the folks, only to be confronted with an unoccupied house. Harry quite naturally gets a little creeped out.

“All of Us Strangers” is forever whiplashing us between the real and the imagined. It probably shouldn’t work, but the players are so astoundingly convincing that we find ourselves believing despite the craziness.

And is it really craziness?  “Strangers…” isn’t into psychoanalyzing Adam; that sort of real-world attitude is at odds with the film’s near-poetic approach.

The moral here: We humans need love. Even if we have to invent it. There’s madness there, but a kind of nobility, too.

| Robert W. Butler

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“TOM CLANCY’S WITHOUT REMORSE”: Colorful killer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 3, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Jodie Turner-Smith, Michael B. Jordan

“TOM CLANCY’S WITHOUT REMORSE” My rating: C (Amazon Prime)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Critical reaction to Netflix’s “Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” has pretty much centered on the fact that leading man Michael B. Jordan is WAY too talented to be wasted on this sort of superficial action drek.

I cannot argue with that analysis — putting Jordan in this “John Wick”-ish clone is like using a thermonuclear device to get rid of a wasp nest hanging from your eaves.

Yet even mediocre movies can be significant within a larger social context, and “Without Remorse” (a cheesy, generic title) feels like the right film at the right time in our intensifying national discussion about race.

Not that the film overtly addresses race. Outwardly, anyway, it’s color blind. But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to find other stuff going on.

Clancy’s 1993 novel introduced readers to John Kelly, a Navy Seal who in 1970 is sent on a Rambo-is mission to recover an American intelligence officer from a North Vietnamese POW camp. He uncovers a high-level government plot to smuggle heroin into the US in the bodies of slain soldiers and instigates a murderous cleanup spree.

Eventually he’s recruited by the CIA, changes his hame to John Clark, and goes on to recurring appearances in a slew of Ryanverse novels.

Presumably the John Clark of the novels is white. Indeed, during the many years that the film version was in preproduction limbo, white actors like Keanu Reeves and Tom Hardy were considered for the role.

The ultimate choice of a black actor probably had less to do with ulterior motives on the part of the filmmakers than on Jordan’s widespread popularity. He is a draw for audiences of all colors.

Watching the film — which has shed its Vietnam-era trappings and takes place in the present; about all it has in common with the novel is the title — one is struck by its seeming color blindness. No mention is made of Kelly/Clark’s race. He’s an elite fighter, a devoted husband and soon-to-be father. But race doesn’t figure into it.

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“ROCKETMAN”: Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Taron Egerton as Elton John

“ROCKETMAN” My rating: B+

121 minutes | MPAA rating: R

I’m not sure exactly what I expected from “Rocketman” — probably just another musical biopic — but this retelling of the rise and near-fall of Elton John is nothing short of terrific.

Oh, sure, it has the standard-issue narrative — musical genius rises from nothing to fame and fortune, then almost loses it all in a whirlwind of drugs, drink and ego — but writer Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) and director Dexter Fletcher (“Eddie the Eagle”) keep finding inventive, eye-popping ways to tell the story.

It doesn’t hurt that they had access to the Elton John musical library of hits (at one time he was selling nearly five percent of all albums worldwide) or that young star Taron Egerton (of the “Kingsmen” franchise) is absolutely riveting in the transformational starring role.

Toss in a slew of very fine supporting performances (especially Jamie Bell as Elton’s long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin) and you have one of the best musical biopics ever made, one that blows “Bohemian Rhapsody” out of the water.

The film begins with the flamboyantly attired Elton (orange sequined jumpsuit, red angel wings, horned helmet) charging into a rehab group session.

As he “shares” with the other addicts, the film shoots back in time to the boyhood of little Reggie Dwight (Matthew Illesley), keyboard genius and unloved son of an emotionally numb military man (Steven Mackintosh) and a borderline floozie mum (Bryce Dallas Howard, utterly convincing as a working-class British mater).

The first sign of just how off the rails this film is willing to go comes early with a scene set in the local pub where the teenage Reggie (now played by Egerton) witnesses a bar brawl and in one complex, uninterrupted shot stumbles out into the streets singing “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fightin’,” weaving in and out of dozens of gyrating dancers.

It’s a bacchanal of music and sex and heavy-breathing (it’ll leave audiences breathless) and announces that “Rocketman,” though remarkably factual, will at times be played like a Felliniesque musical fantasy. (At times I was reminded of Julie Taymor’s Beatles tribute “Across the Universe”…and that’s a very good sign.)

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“DONNYBROOK”: A fistful of melodrama

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Jamie Bell

“DONNYBROOK”  My rating: C (Opens Feb. 15 at the Screenland  Tapcade)

101 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Donnybrook” is a fistful of  cheap melodrama, what with its emphasis on the drugs and violence its protagonist encounters en route to an underground bareknuckle slugfest.

At least give writer/director Tim Sutton props for trying to elevate this yarn with the sort of ashcan realism and social commentary most commonly found in the work of Brit auteur Ken Loach (“The Angels’ Share,” “Jimmy’s Hall,” “I, Daniel Blake”).

Which is not to say that Sutton pulls it off. You can see him struggling to give this chunk of cheese relevance by peppering it with  observations on blue-collar American angst.  That approach worked in “Hell or High Water”; here not much of it sticks.

When we first encounter Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell…yeah, the original Billy Elliott) he’s robbing a gun store and smashing the owner in the face.  This is our hero?

Well, yeah.  Jarhead  may do bad things, but he does them to support his meth head wife (Valerie Jane Parker) and two young kids. By the logic of “Donnybrook” this makes him a hero.  Everybody else in sight is far worse.

Especially Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo), the neighborhood drug dealer.  Accompanied by his sister Delia (Margaret Qualley),  with whom he has a master/slave relationship that reeks of incest, Chainsaw cuts a wide path of bloody destruction.  He may be the only dealer who’d rather kill his clients than sell them drugs.

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“SNOWPIERCER”: A world one mile long

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

John Hurt, Chris Evans and Jamie Bell in "Snowpiercer"

John Hurt, Chris Evans and Jamie Bell in “Snowpiercer”

“SNOWPIERCER” My rating: B (Opens July 2 at the Tivoli, Screenland Armour and Leawood)

126 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Allegorical sci-fi doesn’t get much more headsmackingly ambitious than “Snowpiercer,” a claustrophobic epic from Korean director Joon-ho Bong.

Joon-ho got a toehold in the American market with “The Host,” a superlative monster movie that mixed genuine thrills with offbeat humor. He followed that up by going in exactly the opposite direction with “Mother,” which follows the trials of an unsophisticated Korean woman whose only son is accused of murder.

“Snowpiercer,” though, is his most ambitious movie to date, one filled with big-name actors (Octavia Spencer and Ed Harris, for instance, take small but pivotal roles) and overflowing with political and social satire. It’s as if “Das Boot” were mated with Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

In the near future the world’s great powers try to deal with global warming by shooting into the atmosphere rockets filled with some newfangled chemical that’s supposed to lower Earth’s temperature.  It works all too well, plunging the planet into a new Ice Age that kills just about everything.

But 1,000 lucky — or maybe not so lucky — survivors have found shelter in an ultra high-tech, mile-long train that runs on nuclear energy and for the last 18 years has been roaring unceasingly on a non-stop circuit around the Earth.

We’re first introduced to this brave new world at the back end of the train, where the unwashed proletariat squirm in an existence only a dozen feet wide and hundreds of yards long. it’s like the world’s biggest submarine.

These poor bastards survive on gelatinous protein bars passed out by black-armored riot police who several times each day line everyone up for head counts. Now and then these thugs snatch young children and take them to the front of the train for purposes too unpleasant to contemplate.

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“NYMPHOMANIC: Voumes I and II”: Sexual slog

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 28, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Charlotte Gainsbourg in "Nymphomaniac"

Charlotte Gainsbourg in “Nymphomaniac”

“NYMPHOMANIAC” My rating: C (Opening April 25 at the Screenland Armour)

241 minutes | No MPAA rating

You can’t ignore a film by Lars von Trier. No matter how much you might want to.

The guy’s a genius, but a twisted one. He’s a first-class visual artist and a narrative anarchist who presents himself  as a cinematic provocateur. (I sometimes view him as a child playing with his own feces.) The beauty often on display in his films must be balanced against the inescapable fact that he’s awesomely misanthropic.

In his last movie, the spectacularly good “Melancholia,” von Trier destroyed our planet and everyone on it…but he did it with such artistic high style that we are seduced nonetheless.

His latest, “Nymphomaniac” (how’s that for a punch-in-the-mouth title?), is a much rockier affair. It’s the story of one woman’s tormented sexual history, complete with nudity, erect penises, and even a few fleeting shots of real sex acts. It’s almost as if von Trier is daring us to keep watching the screen.

Yet the film isn’t the least bit erotic (just another sign of von Trier’s perversity). One leaves this four-hour experience with the feeling that sex is hell.

Of course, in von Trier’s world most everything is hell.

(“Nymphomania” currently is available on Time-Warner on-demand. It’s presented as two 2-hour films, each of which must be purchased separately. Vol. I costs about $7; Vol. II costs nearly $10. In some cities it’s being shown theatrically, but none of Kansas City’s art theaters have it listed as an upcoming attraction.)

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“THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN”: What you see is all you get

Posted in Popcorn movies, tagged , , , , on December 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

“THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN” My rating: B- (Opening wide on Dec. 21)

107 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin” has so many jaw-dropping moments of visual splendor that it takes a while to realize that there’s really nothing much of interest here except the jaw-dropping visual splendor.

Employing the motion-capture animation techniques employed in films like “The Polar Express” and the Jim Carrey “Christmas Carol,” this screen adaptation of the late Herge’s universally popular comic book hero should please long-time fans. But it’s hard to imagine it winning many new converts to the Tintin brand.

Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell of “Billy Elliott” fame) is a perpetually boyish, carrot-topped newspaper reporter who goes nowhere without a tan trench coat, brown knickers and a white pooch named Snowy.

He’s sort of like a junior Sherlock Holmes who’s always up to his neck in one mystery or another.

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