Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Emma Stone in Poor Things

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Suzy Bemba, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, Hanna Schygulla. Screenplay: Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Alasdair Gray. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Shona Heath, James Price. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix. 

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

 

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray, Amber Heard. Screenplay: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick. Cinematography: Michael Bonvillain. Production design: Maher Ahmad. Film editing: Alan Baumgarten. Music: David Sardy. 

Zombieland feels so much like a parody of the series The Walking Dead that I had to check to make sure that the movie premiered before the first installment of the TV show. (It did. The series started on Halloween in 2010.) I think if the series had been as entertaining as the movie, I would have stuck with it past the three or four seasons it took for me to burn out on it. Because really there’s no way to take the notion of zombie Armageddon seriously, even though the idea of a viral plague of zombieism may have gained a scintilla of credibility after the Covid pandemic hit. Ruben Fleischer does many things right in the movie, starting with the casting. Woody Harrelson is one of those actors who always improve the movie they’re in, and Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin give him solid support. And Fleischer does something I appreciated: He gets most of the gross-out effects, the splattering of blood, brains, and body parts, over with in the opening credits so he and his screenwriters can just get down to concocting funny situations and lines for his characters: the nerdy Columbus, the Twinkie-jonesing Tallahassee, and the con-artist sisters Wichita and Little Rock. The idea of putting Columbus's “rules” on-screen to be splattered with blood and guts was inspired. This was Fleischer’s debut as a film director, and while he hasn’t quite moved beyond this first achievement, there’s still time. 

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010)

Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010

Cast: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Dan Byrd, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Lisa Kudrow, Aly Michalka, Cam Gigandet, Malcolm McDowell. Screenplay: Bert V. Royal. Cinematography: Michael Grady. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Susan Littenberg. Music: Brad Siegel.

La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Sebastian Wilder: Ryan Gosling
Mia Dolan: Emma Stone
Keith: John Legend
Laura Wilder: Rosemarie DeWitt
Greg Earnest: Finn Wittrock
Bill: J.K. Simmons
David: Tom Everett Scott

Director: Damien Chazelle
Screenplay: Damien Chazelle
Cinematography: Linus Sandgren
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Tom Cross
Music: Justin Hurwitz
Choreography: Mandy Moore

La La Land is an homage to an homage, which may be why it works so well. The acknowledged inspiration of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), tributes to the Hollywood musicals of Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, helps give Damien Chazelle's film the right ironic distancing. Without the tinge of melancholy that informs Demy's hommages, La La Land could have been just another campy pastiche, tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for a movie era that will never return. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were dinged by some critics for not being Fred and Ginger or Gene and Judy, movie stars who could actually sing and dance. But that's very much the point: Just as Gosling's Sebastian wants to be a jazz musician in an age that "hates jazz" and Stone's Mia longs to star in movies like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1952) and Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), they are stuck in the musical and cinematic present. There are no record companies or film studios that would cherish and nurture their dreams. Sebastian's jazz club becomes a "salsa/tapas" joint and even the Los Angeles revival house where he and Mia meet to watch Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) closes soon afterward. Chazelle delicately, deftly plays on the frustration of being born out of time, witnessing a past turned rosy by nostalgia-tinted glasses. In this context, the skillfully done "what might have been" montage at the film's end, in which Seb and Mia live out the happy ending to their love affair that might have capped a real 1950s movie musical, brings home the bittersweet message: You can't have your dreams and eat them, too.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

So, on a repeat viewing, does Birdman hold up as the triumph of style, technique, and performance that won it a best picture Oscar, or is it seriously undermined by pretentiousness and banality? That it is undermined I can't deny, just as I can't deny that the style of Kevin Thompson's production design and Antonio Sanchez's drum score are fresh and powerful, that the technical wizardry of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and the film editing of Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione provide a seamless flow that appears to be one long tracking shot through most of the film, and that Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone give career-landmark performances. But I also have to say that I don't think the movie adds up to enough. As Richard Brody observed in his New Yorker review, Iñárritu even courts comparison to Jean-Luc Godard in the opening titles of his film -- a disastrous comparison to my mind, because whatever his faults, Godard was always going against the grain of conservative politics and social attitudes. Iñárritu is attempting a satire on the power of popular culture and celebrity to foul up even the best-intentioned attempts at doing something different. The problem is that his protagonist, Riggan Thomson (Keaton), is doing little more than trying to change his public image. He's known as a pop-culture hero from his hit Birdman movies, but like every clown who wants to play Hamlet, he's trying to make a Broadway debut in a deadly serious play he has crafted from a Raymond Carver short story. Naturally, he is plagued with insecurity, and nothing that his family, his crew, his fellow actors, or the busily buzzing entertainment media can break him free of it. There is a good human story here, but Iñárritu and his fellow screenwriters, Nicolás Giacabone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo, can't be content to just tell it. Instead, it has to be tarted up with touches of magic realism (the first time we see Riggan he is in his underpants, levitating in his dressing room), and by the unstated fact that Iñárritu has cast as the former Birdman a former Batman. We are in the realm of that tiresome trope, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the screenwriters can't help hammering on the point. Riggan has a sign on his dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said about that thing." And Mike insists that he has to drink real gin during the rehearsals because Raymond Carver was a drunk and everything else on the set is fake. He even tells Riggan's daughter (Stone) that the only time he is real is when he's onstage. The satire tends toward banality when the film takes as its target the omnipotent critic for the New York Times, who is determined, even before she sees the play, to destroy it because she resents a movie star like Riggan invading the sacred temple of the theater. So does the technical finesse of the film make up for these flaws? Only if you're willing to shut off some key parts of your intellect, which is something Godard would never ask you to do.