Director: Robert Stromberg
Runtime: 97 minutes
I'm sure there are loads of think pieces out there blasting Hollywood for repeatedly giving cinematographers, visual effects supervisors, and the like the director's chair for big budget tentpoles. I'm sure those think pieces make many valid points, and I'm sure they make them quite well. Yet this review only has room to target one such person inexplicably charged with directing ("directing") a major star vehicle. His name is Robert Stromberg, and he deserves to be verbally tarred and feathered for the visually bloated disaster that is Disney's Maleficent.
The latest in a line of live action re-imaginings of classic Disney fairy tales (next up: Brannagh does Cinderella! No, really. It's a thing.), Maleficent easily deserves to go down as the worst of the lot. What should be an enjoyable, even if generic, showcase for a brilliantly cast Angelina Jolie, is a sluggish, ineptly-handled attempt at summer entertainment.
As much as the camera loves Jolie as the iconic Sleeping Beauty villain (now a tragic antihero), even she can't overcome Linda Woolverton's abysmal script and Stromberg's unbearably hack-y directing. Small moments here and there work (Jolie's handling of baby Aurora's christening scene is dynamite), but they're nothing more than drops in the ocean.
And even though Maleficent is bad, it's shocking how baffling its badness truly is on all fronts. Despite a visual effects supervisor in the director's chair, there are a distracting number of scenes with jarring, shoddy green screen work. Not helping matters are the plastic-y CGI creations, which look like rejects from 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman.
Just as bad is the editing, which is somehow the work of two people, and not a single, overeager film student. When the cutting isn't merely getting the job done, it goes of in puzzling, risible ways. There are artificial snap zooms, "dramatic" blurry effects, as well as other trademarks of the "more is better" school of editing.
Before I become as big of a mess as Maleficent, I must return to Ms. Woolverton and her writing. There are cliches, and there are painful cliches. Maleficent is overflowing with the latter. Worst of all is the painfully forced comic relief, which puts wonderful actresses like Imelda Staunton, Leslie Manville, and Juno Temple in some truly embarrassing situations. I can't remember the last time I felt so, so bad for a group of actors working with bottom-of-the-barrel material. May they all find their way into a Mike Leigh movie as soon as possible.
Alas, I'm losing focus. Elle Fanning is in this movie too, though her radiant self shows up far too late to undo any of the damage wrought by Stromberg, Woolverton, and their merry band of fools. The only thing done remotely right is the reworking of Sleeping Beauty's waking from true love's kiss. It's a genuinely nice touch (albeit eye-rollingly foreshadowed) that subverts the outdated love-at-first-sight ideology of the animated film. If only it were put to use in a story that was being told with some semblance of intelligence or care (I'd say "and," but I think I'd be setting the bar a bit too high).
In fact, Maleficent is such a wreck that I don't even want to see it remade by more capable hands. Hollywood had its chance for a Maleficent-centric fairy tale for this generation, and it has failed spectacularly. I have enjoyed all of the film's major actors on multiple occasions (I'll overlook Oldboy, Sharlto Copley), yet there's no room to give any praise that's more than half-hearted. Jolie's devilish grin is nice and all, but even all of her star wattage is suffocated by the excess of visual effects and miserable craftsmanship.
Jolie and company are lucky that their film opened on the same weekend as Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West. By being put up against that would-be comedy, they have, by the grace of God, been made to look like the lesser of two evils. Yet the lesser of two evils remains an evil, and not even of the so-bad-it's-good variety. Millions upon millions were spent upon this soul-less mess of a movie. Do your part and make sure that Maleficent struggles to recoup its considerable costs. The actors' careers will remain unscathed, and hopefully Mr. Stromberg's will meet a swift end.
Grade: D-
Directors: Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman
Runtime: 92 minutes
Within the first 15 minutes of Lovelace, the second fiction film from documentary directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the only word that comes to mind is "workman-like." Despite avoiding the sleaze of its time period and subject matter, this biopic/behind-the-scenes look at the life of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace goes through the motions from start to finish. Capable performances, especially Amanda Seyfried's lead role, are enjoyable and hint at a richer, more insightful story. As it stands, however, Lovelace is content to be ordinary down to the bone, mostly for worse.
As Lovelace herself remarks late in the film, she only spent 17 days in the porn industry. Yet the shadow of her breakout film and performance - the first porno to break into the mainstream - looms large over her life. That's a fascinating dynamic to explore, and touches on the ways in which celebrity figures can be defined by the briefest moments in their lives (especially when those moments are mistakes). Yet Andy Bellin's screenplay, determined to cover everything as though checking events off on a list, is more concerned with simply getting from point A to point B, without taking time to explore the emotional and thematic undercurrents of his characters.
Once the film peaks, with Deep Throat becoming a phenomenon, Lovelace starts to lose the already muted momentum that its first 45 minutes kicked off with. Epstein and Friedman do a perfectly adequate job of telling the story, but their techniques are no more insightful that the typical surface-only approach found on a Lifetime movie. As the story takes a darker turn, detailing Linda's fallout with first husband Chuck (Peter Sarsgaard), Lovelace starts to drag, rather than compel. What little spark the film musters up is strictly relegated to the scenes involving the production of Deep Throat, largely stemming from the comedy the film wrings out of the pervy director (Hank Azaria) and producers (Bobby Cannavale and Chris Noth).
Seyfried, meanwhile, is left to navigate a character whose rich dramatic potential is squandered by the material. Seyfried's breakout performance came as the stunningly air-headed Karen in 2004's Mean Girls, a film that used her comedic gifts to excellent effect. Since then, the actress has been trying to move over into meatier roles. Lovelace should have been the one. When Linda sees the promotional shots taken of her for Deep Throat, Seyfried captures the quiet awe of a repressed young woman finally seeing herself as beautiful. Unfortunately, the script provides her with too few of these moments, even skimping on her frosty relationship with her dad (Robert Patrick) and ultra-religious mother (Sharon Stone).
Yet as Lovelace focuses on the rise of a porn icon (one who would go on to become an anti-pornography crusader), it manages to neglect the beginning and end of her story. It avoids outright sleaze, but it also has little interest in true drama other than Chuck being abusive and controlling towards his wife. Though never exploitative, the scenes of abuse (which include Chuck essentially paying a group of men to gang rape his wife), are given far too much weight. They make Linda's dramatic arc into one of a victim, and the shrift her fight against domestic abuse gets only makes the issue more troubling.
Even the star-studded ensemble can't do much to make something more out of Bellin's crushingly simplistic writing. Sarsgaard (who recently completed a stellar turn on AMC's The Killing) makes for a good charmer-turned-abuser, but no one else is really give the time or depth to make an impact outside of a one-liner. What should have been one of the most impactful moments - Linda's reunion with her parents - is little more than shrug-worthy. It's certainly not the cast's fault. One can see the effort being put in by Stone and Seyfried to make the moment work, and Stone almost saves it with a funny remark. But it's too little and far too late. In its standard 90 minute framework, Lovelace succumbs to the hallmark problem of many modern biopics: it tries to cover everything, does it too fleetly, and winds up feeling like a Cliffnotes version of a much richer narrative.
Grade: C/C+
Director: William Friedkin
Runtime: 102 minutes
There may be bouts of violence scattered across William Friedkin's Killer Joe, but like its titular protagonist, the "best" and bloodiest is saved for last. Rightfully earning an NC-17 rating, Friedkin's film, an adaptation of Tracy Letts' play of the same name, may feature brutal violence that borders on exploitation, but remains a thrilling piece of filmmaking. In addition to strong performances from its ensemble, Friedkin succeeds for two crucial reasons. The first is that the adaptation (by Letts himself) has been translated so as to feel wholly cinematic. The second, perhaps even more important, is that the film manages to look at low down, trashy characters without ever feeling as though it's also trash. While the setting and violence may prove a deterrent, the film remains worthy of a look, considering the strengths of the acting, writing, directing. It's bloody and at times wince-inducing, but it's also a bloody good time.
Set in a crummy Texas town, the film revolves around the trailer park antics of the smith family. Oldest son Chris (Emile Hirsch) finds himself in $6000 of debt to some vicious local drug dealers. Pushing along his somewhat slow father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), Chris hatches a plan to hire a Dallas cop named 'Killer' Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to help them. This involves having Joe kill Chris' biological mother (never seen on screen), so that the $50,000 life insurance policy will be sent to Chris' younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple).
And, against considerable odds, Killer Joe manages to actually separate the fine line between simply displaying stupid people and their bad decisions, and actively engaging with them. The characters may not be terribly bright (though many are schemeres in one way or another), but because of the setting any stupidity on the part of the characters doesn't feel like bad writing. It's a smart look at stupidity, an examination that calls to mind some of Joel and Ethan Coen's filmography in how it looks at people getting into something way over their heads, and the bad decisions and outcomes that follow.
That said, the Coens have never made something with as much sensationalist nudity, sexuality, and violence as is seen here. That's part of the reason why Friedkin is so well chosen for the director's chair. Just as the Coens were a perfect match for Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, Killer Joe is right up Friedkin's alley (this marks his second adaptation of a Letts play, after 2006's Bug). Though there are moments when the dialogue begins to border on repetitive or drawn out (the opening scene of Chris banging on a door could be cut in half), Friedkin and editor Darrin Navarro keep things moving along at a pace that effectively blends moments of fluidity and stagnation. This is aided further by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel's excellent job of capturing the characters and their settings, whether in stationary shots or with the camera roving around the scene. The trinity of Friedkin, Navarro, and Deschanel help Killer Joe overcome the obstacles presented in adapting a play, and make the work feel entirely cinematic.
This is all further bolstered, of course, by the excellent ensemble. Hirsch is strong as the closest thing the film has to a 'straight man.' The actor handles the character's shifting views on his town, his family, and his plan effortlessly. Playing off of each other (and the other cast members) are Haden Church and Gina Gershon (as Ansel's second wife, Sharla). Haden Church's slow drawl at times feels at odds with some of the other characters, and it's easy to dismiss him early on. In the later scenes, however, that same drawl is put to great effect in some nicely handled moments of dark comedy. The best performance from the Smith family, however, comes from Temple's Dottie. The actress plays on the characters' situations of forced-upon sexuality with the right bit of enthusiasm and anxiety. For all of the times where Dottie is referred to as being a little slow (well, slower), there are little moments where Temple allows the audience to think that there's more than Dottie than meets the eye (thankfully, the script follows through on the actresses' promise).
Finally, there's Matthew McConaughey as the titular bad cop, who would have stolen show if it weren't for the fact that he's the film's lead (along with Hirsch). Of all of the films that have appeared since his career resurfaced with The Lincoln Lawyer, Joe contains his strongest work. The actor deserves comparisons to Javier Bardem in No Country for his tightly coiled portrayal of man determined to keep his (menacing) cool until he's pushed to the breaking point. The role does allow the actor to engage in some of his tics (namely the swagger and drawl) unlike Jeff Nichols' Mud, but the smarminess is gone. The swagger and drawl feel like authentic parts of his austere, magnetic, dangerously slick character. And if the moments of quiet menace weren't enough for the actor to sink his teeth into, McConaughey also gets to completely cut loose in the film's insane finale (the place where if definitively earns its NC-17 rating).
And what a finale it is. There's violence, ample swearing, and a scene involving Kentucky Fried Chicken that immediately enters into the pantheon of iconically disturbing scenes. And it's perhaps here that Friedkin's direction and Letts' writing are most impressive. Elements of Killer Joe are darkly funny, even in the bloody climax, but the script wisely separates the humor from the brutality, thereby lifting itself above trashy exploitation despite and ensemble fully of trashy people. It's the perfect, mesmerizingly horrific adrenaline rush to the steadily engaging slow-burn that precedes it. The only part of the finale I'm not quite sold on is, unfortunately, the final 10 seconds, which involves a revelation (amid a room full of chaos) and then a cut to black. Unlike No Country, Killer Joe's somewhat open ending actually feels like something of a cop out. For a film that so thoroughly goes out of its way to give you a cinematic rush, it seems odd that it ends anticlimactically. But who knows, maybe that was just Friedkin and Letts' way of sparing us further brutality, and maybe that's for the best. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go check and make sure there isn't any fried chicken in my refrigerator, or else I might have trouble getting to sleep.
Grade: B+
