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Posts Tagged ‘Mads Mikkelsen’

“ANOTHER ROUND”: Bottoms up

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Mads Mikkelsen

“ANOTHER ROUND” My rating: B (VOD)

117 minutes | No MPAA rating

The middle-aged male psyche takes a thorough beating in Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round,” which acts like a black comedy before flirting with tragedy.

Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) teaches upper level  high school history at a private school in Denmark. He’s pretty much on autopilot, droning through his lessons to kids who are more interested in checking their cell phones and talking about last weekend’s binge.

Things aren’t much better at home. His teenage sons view him as  a slight embarrassment; he hardly sees his wife (Maria Bonnevie), who works nights.

“Have I become boring?” he wonders.

Martin’s only close human relationships, apparently, are three coworkers:  Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), the phys ed instructor; Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), who teaches psychology; and Peter (Lars Ranthe), the music director.

All four gentlemen are stuck in the midlife doldrums. They desperately need a change.

Over a birthday dinner Nikolaj brings up the work of a scientist who maintains that the average person’s blood alcohol content is about .05 % below optimum operating levels.  This great mind (or is he a quack?) recommends a steady but controlled intake of alcohol throughout the working day, with nothing consumed after 8 p.m.

Hey…it worked for Ulysses S. Grant, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill.

The four friends decide to make a scientific study with themselves as the guinea pigs. The goal is to achieve “optimal professional and personal performance.” They’ll keep a detailed journal; call it “collecting evidence.”

What could go wrong?

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“ARCTIC”: Whiteout

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , , , on February 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Mads Mikkelsen

“ARCTIC” My rating: B

98 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The man-in-the-wilderness survival drama “Arctic” probably didn’t need a world-class actor.

After all, there’s almost no dialogue and the star of the show spends half the time with his features hidden behind a parka hood. Just about any able-bodied thespian could have handled it.

Even so, give thanks that the great Mads Mikkelsen signed up for this nail-biting bit of outdoor adventure.

Joe Penna’s film begins with a man in a red parka using crude tools to shovel away the white snow to reveal the black rocks beneath.  An overhead shot shows him to be making a huge SOS sign that can be seen by passing aircraft.

Our protagonist (Mikkelsen) has already been stranded in the snowy wastes for days. He survived the wreck of his airplane, which remains intact enough to serve as a shelter. He’s dug holes in the ice and is catching fish, eating some raw and freezing the rest.

And then, rescue!  A helicopter appears and attempts to land. But a gust of wind sends it tumbling. The sole survivor is the pilot (Maria Thelma Smaradottir), a young woman rendered unconscious by the impact.

The man takes her to his plane and sees to her wounds.  But she does’t wake up.  Only the fluttering of her eyelids suggests an inner life.

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“AT ETERNITY’S GATE”: Painting for people not yet born

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 6, 2018| 1 Comment »

Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh

“AT ETERNITY’S GATE” My rating: A-

110 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-12

Epically poetic yet aching personal, “At Eternity’s Gate” may be the best film ever about Vincent  Van Gogh.

For that matter, it is among the best movies ever made about a visual artist. Undoubtedly much of the insight and emotion radiating off the screen can be traced back to writer/director Julian Schnabel who was, of course, a famed painter long  before he began  making films.

Visually lush and aurally haunting, “At Eternity’s Gate” follows Vincent through the last year or so of his life.

It is told in fragmented fashion, with scenes built around a series of dialogues between Vincent (Willem Dafoe in the best performance of his career) and others: his supportive brother Theo (Rupert Friend), his combative fellow painter Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), a fellow patient in a mental institution (Niels Arestrup), a disapproving priest (Mads Mikkelsen), a sympathetic physician (Mathieu Amalric).

And when he’s not talking, this Vincent is painting, creating before our eyes the colorful masterpieces that would not be appreciated until long after his death at age 37. A good chunk of “At Eternity’s Gate” is devoted to following Vincent on his nature walks, easel and canvasses strapped to his back, head shaded with a floppy straw hat.

This is a transcendental Vincent, a man who stands in the sunshine with his arms outstretched, smiling ecstatically at the light that bathes him.

Our first encounter with this Vincent, though, occurs in darkness. We can only hear his voice. He’s talking about loneliness, about how he feels set apart from the rest of humanity: “I just want to be one of them…I’d like them to give me some tobacco, a glass of wine, or even ask: ‘How are you?’…from time to time I’d make a sketch of one of them as a gift.”

The key to Dafoe’s inspiring, heartbreaking performance is the way in which Vincent’s almost religious love affair with the world’s beauty is undercut by his sad “otherness.”  Most people don’t like him. They make fun of him. His eccentricities, poverty and neediness bring out the worst in his fellow man. (An art dealer of my acquaintance once explained that “Everybody wants a Van Gogh in their dining room; nobody wants Van Gogh in their  dining room.”)

Thus he’s an apologetic mystic, aware that he rubs others the wrong way, but unable to escape the almost epileptic thrall into which he is forever being plunged by the beauty of the world around him.

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“ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY”: Over it

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2016| Leave a Comment »

rogue-one-at-act“ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY” My rating: C+

133 minutes | MPAA rating: R

After nearly 40 years of Wookies, Jedis and Imperial storm troopers, am I finally over the whole “Star Wars” thing?

The sad truth is that I was underwhelmed — sometimes flat-out bored — by “Rogue One,” the latest addition to the “SW” universe.

And here’s the thing…it’s  not a bad movie.  Certainly not bad like the three George Lucas-driven prequels were.

“Rogue One” is reasonably well acted and technically flawless. Moreover, it’s an attempt to make a more adult, racially-diverse “Star Wars” film, a stand-alone tale that is darker both thematically (it’s like an intergalactic Alamo where everyone goes down fighting) and visually.

Nevertheless, “Rogue One” is emotionally lifeless. I didn’t care.

Director Gareth Edwards and the producers and writers have worked so hard to hit familiar buttons of “Star Wars” mythology that the resulting film feels generic, as if it were directed by a committee rather than a single visionary individual.

The plot, for those who have been living in the spice mines of Kessel, follows the efforts of a team of rebel spies to steal the plans for the Death Star, an enterprise that will result in the destruction of said moon-sized weapon by Luke Skywalker in the original “Star Wars” movie.

Our heroine is Jyn (Felicity Jones), whose scientist father Galen (Mads Mikkelsen) was taken from her to develop the Death Star.  After years of crime and imprisonment, Jyn is given an opportunity by the Rebel Alliance. She will be part of a team tasked with finding Galen and getting those precious plans.

They’re a mixed bag of idealists and pragmatic warriors.

Foremost among them is Cassian (Diego Luna), the ostensible head of the team who, unbeknownst to Jyn, as been secretly ordered to assassinate her father, lest his genius bring the Death Star to completion.

Chirrut (Donnie Yen) is a blind swordsman who relies on The Force to battle enemies. A pretty obvious nod to a subgenre of samurai films, he’s got a grouchy partner (Wen Jiang) who fights with a monstrous hand cannon.

Bodhi (Riz Ahmed) is a pilot who knows his way around the Empire’s military outposts.

Best of the bunch is  K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk), a towering droid made by the Empire but reprogrammed to serve the Rebel Alliance.  Apparently K-2SO also was given a microchip for sarcasm and irony, which he exercises regularly at the expense of his human cohorts. (more…)

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“MEN AND CHICKEN”: A species non-specific comedy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Mads Mikkelson, Dav id

Mads Mikkelsen, David Dencik

“MEN & CHICKEN” My rating: B

95 minutes | MPAA rating

WTF?!?!?!?

This will be a common reaction to the Danish “Men & Chicken,” an extremely black comedy that plays like a Three Stooges version of
H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

Our protagonists are bickering brothers Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Mads Mikkelsen).  They don’t look like brothers — Gabriel is short and balding, Elias is tall and hairy — but they have almost identical hairlips.

And their personalities couldn’t be more different. Gabriel is a college science lecturer who resents his crazy brother Elias for wrecking every romantic relationship he’s ever had. Once the women get a gander at Elias — a bizarrely compulsive fellow who masturbates several times a day and claims to be a great ladies man (though he’s never been on a date) — they decline to swim in that particular gene pool.

In a video last will and testament their late father reveals that the boys were adopted. In fact, they are the offspring of one Evilio Thanatos, a brilliant but disgraced geneticist who has spent the last 50 years on a remote Danish island. Curious about their heritage, the pair go looking for Daddy.

What they find are three of their brothers — the chicken-porking Gregor (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), the cheese-obsessed Franz (Soren Malling) and the taxidermy-crazed Josef (Nicolas Bro) — living in spectacular squalor in the rotting sanitarium that has always been their home. All three are genetic oddities: hairlips, hammer toes, gnarly noses.

Initially they attack and pummel their uninvited guests. But, getting used to the idea of an extended family, they reveal that their father is ailing and never leaves his bed in a remote upstairs room.  No visitors.

So Gabriel and Elias decide to hang around, settling into one of the few rooms not overrun by the cattle, sheep, geese, chickens, pigs and other livestock that have taken over the ground floor of the old hospital.

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