Friday, October 11, 2019

Crisp Criticism - "Joker", "Gemini Man", "Transit", "Brittany Runs a Marathon", "Adam" Retrospection - My Man Godfrey (1936)

by
Julien Faddoul






Joker

During the 1980s, a failed stand-up comedian is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in New York Ci-- I mean Gotham City.
A con, and a fairly hostile one at that. A film with the sole purpose of sucking up to both enlightened liberals and those of whom that have not experienced an adulthood that didn’t involve the canonizing of infantile comic book characters, but did involve the vital character studies by Martin Scorsese from the 70s and 80s; surreptitiously and shamefully trying to blur the lines between the two groups. Phoenix gives a committed but ultimately mannered and unconvincing performance. This is the kind of rubbish that hustlers can pull when an audience is so starved for basic craftsmanship and is so unaware of anything that might have been prominent before the age and climate that they live within.

d – Todd Phillips
w – Todd Phillips, Scott Silver   (Based on the Characters Created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson
ph – Lawrence Sher
pd – Mark Friedberg
m – Hildur Guðnadóttir
ed – Jeff Groth
cos – Mark Bridges

p – Todd Phillips, Bradley Cooper, Emma Tillinger Koskoff

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Shea Whigham, Bill Camp, Glenn Fleshler, Leigh Gill, Josh Pais, Marc Maron, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Douglas Hodge, Dante Pereira-Olson, Brian Tyree Henry, Sharon Washington







Gemini Man *

An ageing assassin tries to get out of the business but finds himself fighting his own clone who is 25 years younger than him and at the peak of his abilities.
A discombobulating experience, but one that is certainly of interest for cineastes. Shot digitally at a frame rate of 120fps, modified for 3D on ARRI Alexa cameras mounted on STEREOTEC 3D Rigs, with Smith giving a motion-capture performance as the younger clone, rather than being de-aged in post-production. All of this is in service of a script that is basic at best and risible at worst. In regards to its director, it’s unclear why one of the great humanists of modern-day cinema has dedicated the last 10 years of his career to emulating something as juvenile as Avatar (2009). Quite baffling.

d – Ang Lee
w – David Benioff, Billy Ray, Darren Lemke
ph – Dion Beebe
pd – Guy Hendrix Dyas
m – Lorne Balfe
ed – Tim Squyres
cos – Suttirat Anne Larlarb

p – Jerry Bruckheimer, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger

Cast: Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong, Linda Emond, Theodora Miranne, Justin James Boykin, Alexandra Szucs, Douglas Hodge, Tim Connolly, Victor Hugo, Georgia Curtis






Transit **

In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, a German assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with the author’s deaf wife.
Petzold is a frustrating filmmaker: He’s eminently adept at technique and with actors, but his films consistently rely on some kind of flimsy allegory. The conceit here is that the novel, set and written during World War II, is updated to the present, Nazis and all, for no epistemological reason outside of a political commentary concerning the future. The whole remains conceptually interesting, but one feels that if the apologue weren’t there, the narrative's central relationship – in which two lovers are repeatedly not saying what needs to be said to one another out of guilt – would appear as banal as it actually is.

wd – Christian Petzold   (Based on the Novel by Anna Seghers)
ph – Hans Fromm
pd – Kade Gruber
m – Stefan Will
ed – Bettina Böhler
cos – Katharina Ost

p – Antonin Dedet, Florian Koerner von Gustorf

Cast: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Sebastian Hülk






Brittany Runs a Marathon

A young woman decides to make positive changes in her life by training for the New York City Marathon.
Generic small-scale comedy that you’ve seen a hundred times before, with far too much felicitating given to the new found superiority derived from losing weight, despite its attempt at sentiment near the end. Catnip for fat-haters.

wd – Paul Downs Colaizzo
ph – Seamus Tierney
pd – Erin Magill
m – Duncan Thum
ed – Casey Brooks
cos – Stacey Berman

p – Margot Hand, Tobey Maguire, Matthew Plouffe

Cast: Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins, Micah Stock, Utkarsh Ambudkar, LilRel Howery, Alice Lee, Jennifer Dundas, Patch Darragh, Erica Hernandez






Adam

An awkward teen spends a summer with his older sister, who is part of New York City’s lesbian and trans activist scene, where he meets the girl of his dreams but can’t figure out how to tell her he’s not the trans man she thinks he is.
Ludicrous, conceptually repugnant film that will offend not only trans-people but anyone with an operating brain.  

d – Rhys Ernst
w – Ariel Schrag   (Based on the Book by Ariel Schrag)
ph – Shawn Peters
pd – Nora Mendis
m – Jay Wadley 
ed – Joe Murphy
cos – Olga Mill

p – James Schamus, Howard Gertler

Cast: Nicholas Alexander, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Leo Sheng, Chloë Levine, Margaret Qualley, Haley Murphy, Gracie Lawrence, Hayley Huntley, Colton Ryan






My Man Godfrey ***

A zany and immature millionaire family invite a tramp to be their butler and find he is more put together – both intellectually and financially – than they are.
One of the quintessential screwball comedies of the 1930s, though La Cava’s pacing seems a tad unsure when compared to the greats of that period (Lubitsch, Cukor etc.) The cast is incandescent, especially Powell and Lombard, who in real life had just divorced 3 years earlier. It remains a great example of the mentality of Depression-era Hollywood, mixing sophisticated comedy with ubiquitous financial concerns. 

d – Gregory La Cava
w – Morrie Ryskind, Eric Hatch   (Based on the Novel by Eric Hatch)
ph – Ted Tetzlaff
ad – Charles D. Hall
md – Charles Previn
ed – Ted Kent, Russell F. Schoengarth
cos – Travis Banton

p – Charles R. Rogers

Cast: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Jean Dixon, Mischa Auer, Alan Mowbray





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