SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Music: B-

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an unconventional biopic in a multitude of ways, not least of which is it’s definitively, pointedly unexciting. This is a movie about three things: the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, one of the lesser-known albums of his 53-year career; depression; and childhood trauma.

This film really leans into the childhood trauma part, opening with a flashback to Bruce at 8 years old, with his parents played by Stephen Graham and Gabby Hoffman. This era of his life, always presented in black and white, is returned to consistently throughout the film. As we return to Bruce as an adult, dating a composite-character woman (Odessa Young) we never particularly care about, Springsteen is working on this album we are clearly meant to understand is informed by these childhood memories. It’s a bunch of acoustic songs, a major departure from his previous rock albums, and Springsteen is very particular about how it’s recorded, how it’s released, and how it’s marketed—which is to say, not at all.

At the end of the film, we get title cards informing us that even with no tour and no singles to support it, Nebraska still reached #3 on the album charts. It doesn’t bother to say that the album sold a million copies—an impressive number out of context to be sure, but his previous album, The River, sold five times that much; and his next album, Born in the U.S.A., sold 17 million, by far his greatest success and the 7th-best selling album of the eighties. To say that Nebraska was overshadowed by these other albums is an understatement, and it never would have sold nearly what it did without Springsteen’s other massive successes.

I had never listened to Nebraska myself. I’m listening to it literally as I write this. I have never been a Springsteen guy—I think he’s fine; he’s just not my thing—but, knowing I tend to like it when an artist does what a record executive in this film (played by David Krumholtz) calls “a folk album,” I expected to be into it. Well—it’s okay. My response to this album is about the same as my response to this film. Somewhat similarly, I noted with last year’s Bob Dylan Biopic—a far better film than this one—A Complete Unknown that I was never a Dylan guy either. I did like Timothée Chalamet’s singing performance as Bob Dylan, though; in fact I preferred that to the real Dylan. Jeremy Allen White does a pretty spot-on performance as Bruce Springsteen, including performance. But I also prefer Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob-Dylan to this.

At least A Complete Unknown, and several other music biopics before it, had moments of thrilling musical electricity. Such things are beside the point with Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is about a deeply personal album that clearly was, and clearly still is, very important to Springsteen. He was reportedly on set every day, which indicates that this film is similarly important to him. This is probably not the story most of his diehard fans would be interested in, but it’s the story he wants them to know. It’s also very drab and melancholy.

If you approach Deliver Me From Nowhere from the perspective of childhood trauma and adult depression, it becomes quite unconventional for a biopic and a fascinating examination of something rarely discussed in this context. On the other hand, the extent of this relationship with Bruce’s alcoholic father, and especially with his protective mother, is never given a great deal of depth, even with the large number of flashbacks. Most of this movie is just Bruce quietly moving through his life, recording a studio album that baffles his record label, and dwelling on these memories.

Jeremy Allen White does a very good job in the part, and Jeremy Strong gives a fine performance as his manager and friend Jon Landau, if not necessarily one that seems to justify his notorious method acting approach. Paul Walter Hauser appears as a guy helping Bruce with the recording, and Marc Maron as a studio engineer is so underused that in the first several scenes in which he appears he doesn’t even speak. At least he got to hang out and chat with Springsteen on set, seven years after Springsteen opened up about his struggles with depression on Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

I’m all for cinematic examinations of trauma and depression, if they’re done well. They just don’t make for a very exciting music biopic, which, a bit ironically, the marketers of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere basically promised. I find myself wondering if studio executives responded to the final product of this film the way executives did to the Nebraska albums: what are we supposed to do with this? Throw it to the wall and see if it sticks, I guess.

Deliver me to something more exciting.

Overall: B-

BLUE MOON

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who was composer Richard Rogers’s professional partner for 24 years, was about five feet tall. So this was a big sticking point for me with Blue Moon, in which 5’10” Ethan Hawke was cast to play the part. This is a film directed by Richard Linklater, which by definition means it’s a low budget film, and really none of the ways in which Hawke is made to look like a small man look real or authentic. It’s a constant distraction. Are there really no talented short actors who could have been cast? Where’s Joe Pesci when you need him? Being way too old now, I guess. And too Italian-American. Lorenz Hart was Jewish.

They accomplished the physical transformation, reportedly, with “old stagecraft” techniques, including camera angles and forced-perspective similar to how they made the Hobbits look smaller in the Lord of the Rings films. At least those films also had spectacular special effects to distract from when these camera angles might otherwise be noticeable. The real issue with Hawke, however, is that he still has the proportions of a much taller man. When you see his hands, or even his head, in the same frame as those of another character, they look strangely large for how small a man he was supposed to be.

I really found all of this difficult to get past, making Blue Moon one of the most distractible films of Richard Linklater’s career. It’s also very much like a stage play, having been written by Robert Kaplow, whose only previous screenplay credit is the 2008 film Me and Orson Welles. There have been other exceptions, but this is a rare case of Linklater directing someone else’s work. And with the singular exception of an opening flashback of Hart’s death in an alley eight months later, the entirety of the film is set in a single bar, on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

This is a transitional moment, the opening night of Rogers and Hammrstein’s first collaboration—and, essentially, the nail in the coffin of Rogers and Hart’s collaboration. Hart did contribute five songs to one more Hammerstein musical before his death, but that was it. On this night, in this movie, Hart sits at the bar, chatting up everyone who will listen: the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale); the bar pianist and aspiring composer, Morty (Joanh Lees); the writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) who happens to be sitting at a nearby table; Richard Rogers himself (Andrew Scott) once the show has ended and the cast and crew has come here for a celebration; and Hart’s biggest obsession, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley).

Hart’s sexuality is a constant touch point in this script, because of this obsession with Elizabeth, with whom Hart spent a weekend some months ago. Given that Hart at one point literally and unironically calls himself “a cocksucker,” I suppose we could call him bisexual. Hawke does play him with well-observed nuance, giving him a subtly queer vibe that still does not take away our belief in his desire for Elizabeth. Hawke is an objectively good actor, but given that he is neither queer nor short, there are multiple distractions to his very existence in the part.

Blue Moon is getting widely positive reviews, and for the record, I did like it. I just did not find it exceptional. Even for a Richard Linklater movie—and that’s saying a lot—Hart talks too much. I can’t fathom the number of lines Hawke memorized for this, and most of the time he’s engaging even when the character is being frequently deluded. But there still came a point at which Hart yammered on for so long at that bar that I thought: all right, enough! Shut up!

Hart spends a lot of time criticizing the writing in Oklahoma!—right down to the inclusion of that exclamation point—and then, predictably, fawning over every part of it to both Rogers and Hammerstein once they actually arrive. Blue Moon gets some energy injected into it once the crowd arrives, as at least then all the talking makes sense. Until then, it’s a seemingly endless scene in a sparsely attended bar that feels a tad overwritten. Margaret Qualley feels slightly anachronistic, out of time, in this movie, but still has undeniable screen presence. Andrew Scott seems capable of feeling comfortably at home in just about any part he’s in.

It’s a solid cast, and for a movie that seems tailor made to be tedious and dull, I was never bored. I did spend some time wondering when it could go somewhere or get to a point, but this is a hallmark of Richard Linklater movies (especially ones he actually writes), with varying degrees of success. It’s possible this one is just a tad past its time. How many people going to the movies today know who Rogers and Hammerstein were, let alone what musicals they made together? And they were a far more famous duo than Rogers and Hart ever were. Perhaps that’s why the small mess of a man Lorenz Hart was gets a bit of love here. It’s too bad he’s just as forgotten as soon as this movie’s over. Like his career, though, it was pretty good while it lasted.

To call this a towering achievement would be misleading.

Overall: B

BETTER MAN

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+
Music: B

I’m sure you’re all wondering: does anyone fuck Robbie-Williams-as-chimp in Better Man? Well, not onscreen. Someone gives him a hand job though!

Here’s the most impressive thing about Better Man, though: it has an astonishing ability to make you forget its wackadoodle premise: this is a biopic about British pop superstar Robbie Williams, except Robbie is the singular character rendered as a CGI chimpanzee. It’s a liberalization of two ideas at once: a pop star as a dancing monkey (okay, yes, I know, chimps aren’t monkeys, that’s not the point) and raving addict as an out of control animal. I’m not sure how well the layered metaphors work in the many scenes of Robbie as a child, mind you, detailing his love of his nan who openly accepts him flaws and all. He’s neither dancing nor out of control at that young an age, and all I could think of was how his mother must have reacted when she pushed a chimp through her hoo-ha.

Indeed, I really wondered how a movie like this would tackle sexuality. I’ll certainly give director and co-writer Michael Gracey this much credit: his does indeed write Robbie Williams as a sexual being—under normal circumstances it would make no sense not to—but he does it relatively subtly, only one scene being overtly sexual (the aforementioned hand job, from a fan at a meet and greet), and somehow, it actually works in the context of the narrative. I couldn’t tell you what the secret sauce was that he used, though; this is otherwise a pretty straightforward biopic story.

It’s also a fun one, most of the time. I had a good time. The trailers do not make this clear, but Better Man is also a musical in the classic sense, with Robbie breaking out into song as part of the narrative, in addition to the several we see him perform onstage in concert. Relatively early on there is a truly dazzling sequence, an almost seamless blend of on-camera choreography and blue screen, the camera swirling around Robbie as he moves from indoors to join a massive crowd of synchronized dancers out in the street. A particularly nice touch is when the crowd jumps, but just close enough to doing it at the same time so that their jumps form a quick rave from the front of the crowd to the back. It’s mesmerizing and incredibly entertaining, and I wish Better Man had more sequences like it.

What it does have far too much of is a focus on Robbie Williams’s self-loathing, with constant cutaways to other versions of himself in audiences, reacting back to him with everything from disapproving scowls to outright hateful screaming. This happens a lot, well past the point of it becoming tiresome, until finally in one fantasy sequence he jumps from the stage and engages in combat with them all, to the death. He even seems to kill is inner child, a choice that I could not quite wrap my brain around, aside from it perhaps representing the extremity of his suicidal ideation. I understand what Gracey is going for with this, but it is overwrought and overdone. This is on top of the many scenes we see of him excessively drinking and doing drugs. It seems worth mentioning yet again that it’s a chimp we see doing all these things. A chimp with a British accent—both motion capture and voice performance by English actor Jonno Davies (the voiceover narration and the music vocals are from Williams himself).

Then there’s the issue of the music. It should be noted that Robbie Williams, while a massive star elsewhere in the world, never broke through in the United States, and it’s not difficult to see why. I went to his official YouTube page, played the most-played music video posted there, and then fell asleep.

To be fair, contextualized in the film, Robbie Williams’s music is a lot more fun, though none of it made me eager to download the motion picture soundtrack. Better Man has several musical sequences and interludes that are undeniably infectious, all of them performed by a CGI chimp with a stunning amount of legit charisma, even when being depraved. Robbie Williams as a character in this movie is someone you connect with, you empathize with, and you root for. It’s kind of a stunning surprise, and makes you wonder whether it would even work as well if he were portrayed by a regular human. The plot beats are fairly by the numbers, after all, and the chimp-as-metaphor forces a kind of consideration that it would never manage otherwise.

What an odd, fun, deceptively conventional movie this is, wrapped in a wildly unconventional concept. It’s not nearly as provocative as it clearly wants you to think it is, but it will impress anyway, particularly how deeply expressive Robbie Williams’s CGI chimp face is, using FX technology that barely works but still works well, and at the same time will look dated in five years. Perhaps the same is the case for Better Man as a movie overall, but sometimes you only need a movie to work right now, and right now, this one works surprisingly well.

He’s not a monkey, get it straight!

Overall: B

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Music: A

I have a confession to make: I have never, before today, sat down and listened to any Bob Dylan album from start to finish. I am actually listening to his 1965 landmark Highway 61 Revisited for the first time, literally as I write this. And my first impression, upon hearing Dylan’s singing, is that Timothée Chalamet’s performance in A Complete Uknown is actually a bit more subtle than the real man himself. You know how people sound when they do comic impressions of Bob Dylan? That’s what he actually sounded like. If Chalamet had gone for absolute accuracy, people might have thought he was being a little over the top.

Honestly I enjoyed Timothée’s version better.

To be fair, I’m getting a bit more into Highway 61 Revisited as it goes along, although its status as something that exploded the music industry would never be clear just from listening to it, without a music history lesson. More fundamentally, and this is something the film depicts beautifully, Bob Dylan’s talent as a songwriter is undeniable. One wonders if someone like me might like it better performed by a better singer. There’s certainly plenty of that to choose from—from Simon & Garfunkel to to Heart and Ann Wilson—just in my own music collection. It’s easy for young music fans to be completely ignorant of the wide reach of Dylan’s staggering infuence.

People truly idolize this man, particularly working musicians, and many quite famous ones. Could we even say that, at this point, there is more idolatry of Dylan than there is of the Beatles? That is perhaps up for debate, and to be fair, Dylan is still alive (he’s 83) and only half of the Beatles are still alive; if they were still alive and producing music today, they’d probably still be ahead on that front. In any case, the cultural reach of Bob Dylan simply cannot be overestimated.

A Complete Unknown climaxes with Bob Dylan’s famous (or infamous, depending on the perspective) performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he angered the crowd by performing with electric rather than acoustic guitar. The scene is a curious one to witness, with the crowd immediately responding with confusion and anger, literally throwing things at Dylan and his band onstage. Director and co-writer James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) makes an interesting choice here, not focusing a great deal on the crowd at least partially coming around as the set goes on. If you’re paying attention, you see specific audience members initially screaming in anger later moving happily to the beat.

To Mangold’s credit, there was no need to bring me around, as I was locked in with A Complete Unknown from start to finish. This is due to two key components, the most important being the music: the actors (including Chalamet) performing the songs themselves, and doing so wonderfully. There’s a lot of beautiful acoustic music in this film that I was only moderately familiar with and very much enjoyed, bringing to mind the 2013 Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis—blatantly Dylan-inspired, and an objectively better film.

The second key component is the casting, which is stellar all around. Tomothée Chalamet’s inevitable Oscar nomination will be fully justified; Edward Norton brings an old-school warmth to Pete Seeger; Monica Barbara is subtly radiant as Joan Baez; Elle Fanning does a lot with a girlfriend part that is typically thankless; Boyd Holbrook is irresistibly charismatic as Johnny Cash; Scoot McNairy is astonishingly compelling as a nonverbal Woody Guthrie suffering from Huntington’s disease. Many have already commented on how A Complete Unknown follows pretty typical beats of a film biopic, and this is accurate, but the fantastic cast and the fantastic music largely renders an otherwise by-the-numbers script to be inconsequential.

What’s more, the script takes the wise course of focusing on a specific moment in a person’s life, rather than attempting to cover an entire life. In this case, it’s the early- to mid-sixties, Bob Dylan’s early years, gaining a startlingly quick amount of fame with folk music with the uncharacteristic distinction of being original compositions (with the exception of his largely ignored debut record of covers), and then culminating in a monumental expression of freedom so as not to feel boxed in by fan and producer expectations. To be specific, “going electric.” And that sequence, at the Newport Folk Festival, is indeed electric.

Incidentally, while I was writing this, Highway 61 Revisited ended, and I went back and played his sophomore album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I must admit, I’m enjoying this earlier, acoustic folk sound better. Now I am also disappointed he went electric. What an asshole!

The Bob and Joan Story—is one that will suck you in regardless of generation or musical interest.

Overall: B+

PIECE BY PIECE

Directing: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Animation: B+

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

DUMB MONEY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

I’m honestly surprised no one has titled a movie Dumb Money before now. This movie itself informs us that “dumb money” refers to investments made by individual, non-institutional investors. Here that money is represented, first and foremost, by Keith Gill, a regular guy who inspired an investment revolution aimed at hitting hedge fund managers where it hurts.

This is the GameStop story you likely remember from the news—from literally just two years ago. It’s not often that a true story gets optioned, greenlit, produced and released to theaters with that kind of turnaround time. The height of the GameStop buying frenzy occurred in March 2021, and this film’s script writers were hired the following May.

What curious timing this film has. On the one hand, it tells the story incredibly soon after it actually happened—in movie production time, two years is not a lot. On the other hand, early 2021 was also the height of the covid pandemic, with most people working from home unless they were essential workers, and right now that feels like an entire world away.

It’s worth noting that more people are seen walking around in face masks in Dumb Money than any other wide release film I can think of. The way director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) represents mask-wearing in this movie is strange inconsistent and sometimes outright odd. Of course, any director wants his actors’ faces to be visible wherever possible, so for instance, we see hospital staff removing masks when only two people are in a room together, even though at the time hospital staff would be masking around anyone at all. A bar waitress removes her mask to gawk at Keith Gill’s stock portfolio on his phone. A GameStop store manager is constantly telling his employee to wear his mask properly, which is actually right and correct, and yet we are meant to think of the manager as a nag and the employee as the one to root for. We get it, the whole mask thing was annoying. Does it make sense to subtly villainize the people insisting on doing the right thing to actually save lives?

Dumb Money isn’t so much concerned with the details of a pandemic, however—only with the “little people” who stuck it to the man while one was happening. It’s relevant that many companies raked on record profits at the expense of essential workers, and kind of odd that no one in this movie ever mentions it.

Still, the whole business, in this particular context, is undeniably fascinating, and kind of surprisingly fun. Given the time in which the story occurred, we don’t get any crowd scenes, yet Dumb Money features a large ensemble cast, of people mostly existing in separate locations. I find myself wondering if Keith Gill and his actual family are as colorful as depicted onscreen here, with Keith played by Paul Dano; his brother Kevin played by Pete Davidson, and his parents played by Clancy Brown and Kate Burton. Having Kevin employed as a DoorDash delivery guy who constantly grabs bites out of the food he delivers is an odd detail. Anyone whose OCD was exacerbated by the hygiene practices of peak covid are certain to be triggered by that.

A lot of other stars are featured among the rest of the supporting staff. A couple other random “regular guy” investors, among a handful, are represented by America Ferrera and Anthony Ramos. Shortsighted billionaires are played by Nick Offerman and Vincent D'Onofrio; a multimillionaire by Seth Rogen. Shailene Woodley is Keith’s wife, Caroline, here depicted as uniformly supportive.

The pacing moves at a steady clip, keeping the runtime at a tight 105 minutes, although it relies heavily on YouTube and TikTok clips, not to mention memes. On the whole, Dumb Money is unexceptional, but I enjoyed it. It’s certainly a unique story worth being told. I can’t say it commands viewing in a theater, much as I advocate for the theatrical experience. This is a movie worthy of an eventual couple of hours on your television.

Well this guy was not as dumb as he looked.

Overall: B

OPPENHEIMER

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special effets: A

Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page biography, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and published in 2005, called American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. For director and co-writer Christopher Nolan to adapt a book of that length and density, it’s of little surprise that this film is a solid three hours long, and doesn’t feel like it due to its own density.

I have mixed feelings about the editing, which jumps around multiple timelines, albeit with parallel arcs—more than one detailing a hearing. In one, Oppenheimer, expertly played by Cillian Murphy, is being interrogated as someone with “leftist” and communist ties. In another, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) is facing a Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Commerce, and at first it seems like he is being scrutinized for his own associations with Oppenheimer, but the dynamics of that hearing evolve over the film’s run time.

Does any of this sound like a movie that commands being shot entirely in IMAX film stock? The expansive marketing for this movie sure made it seem so, which was easy to assume to be true given Nolan’s filmography. To be clear, I was very impressed by this movie, but I did leave it at the end wondering why it was so essential that it be seen at a legit IMAX theater—which I had gone out of my way to do. I am here to tell you: it is not essential. It does look great that way, but also the vast majority of this movie is just people in rooms talking. That can be just as effective at a standard movie theater, or even, arguably, on a home entertainment system.

There are some visually awe-inspiring moments, to be fair. A great deal of time is spent building up to the test of the first-ever atom bomb, which Oppenheimer was perhaps most instrumental in inventing–that being the very reason this film exists. And, much has been made of this movie having no CGI shots in it, which is impressive indeed. The practically rendered (yet still, thankfully, not a real example of precisely what was being rendered) mushroom cloud, a giant plume of fire steadily expanding into the sky, makes a memorable sight on an IMAX screen. I had to lean forward so I could take the image in in its entirety, from the bottom of the screen past the people in rows ahead of me, to the top.

These moments, though, it really should be noted, are comparatively fleeting. Again, this is a solid three-hour film, and only a small percentage of that time is dedicated to explosions. The rest is dedicated to scientific theory, math equations, moral quandaries, a bit of philandering, and a bit of backstabbing. A memorable line: “The truly vindictive have the patience of a saint.” Having not read the biography, which in all likelihood I never will, I wondered to what extent this protracted personal rivalry between Strauss and Oppenheimer was invented, or embellished, for cinema.

I can say this much: seeing Robert Downey Jr. as any character besides Iron Man is truly a breath of fresh air. The man is 58 years old and he actually looks his age in this movie, something that hasn’t happened in so long, it took me multiple scenes before I even realized it was him I was looking at. Plus, he’s finally been given a role that showcases his genuine talent for the first time in about fifteen years.

Cillian Murphy may be the clear star of this cast, but it’s still a huge ensemble, packed with one recognizable face after the other: Matt Damon (also excellent) as General Leslie Groves; Alden Ehrenreich as a Senate aide; Kenneth Branagh as Danish physicist Niels Bohr; Josh Hartnett as nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence; Matthew Modine as science administrator Vannevar Bush; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; Casey Affleck as military intelligence officer Boris Pash; Dane DeHaan as civil engineer Kenneth Nichols; David Krumholtz as physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi; and Rami Malek as an aide whose testimony provides a critical plot turn. (Malek appears in two scenes with no dialogue at all first, and only later gets the pivotal scene with actual lines.) That’s just a liberal sampling, and doesn’t even mention the only two female parts with any substantiveness: Emily Blunt, excellent in a part that’s easy to feel ambivalent about, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife, Kitty; and Florence Pugh as Jean, Oppenheimer’s mentally unstable mistress. Pugh in particular is kind of wasted here, barely recognizable in a minor role that does nothing whatsoever to showcase her ample talents.

All of these people populate multiple interwoven, cross-cutting narrative threads, and that they are edited together with coherence is an impressive achievement, a big part of what makes the film move along at a steady clip in spite of its length. Oppenheimer is getting astoundingly positive reviews, will likely be on a ton of “best of the year” lists, and all but guaranteed to garner a ton of Oscar nominations, perhaps more than any other film this year. None of this presents as a mystery to me; I get it. I even have a feeling that I would gain deeper appreciation for this movie by seeing it multiple times. But, I mean, who has the time!

Whether I can say I think Oppenheimer is overrated, if only slightly, is something only time can tell. I really enjoyed it, and many others clearly have as well. There’s certainly something to be said for the consistency with which Christopher Nolan can make original films, that are not sequels or reboots or part of broad IP, legitimate event movies. The man is in a class of his own, particularly among filmmakers of his generation.

I still feel compelled to reiterate this film not especially worth the premium pricing of the IMAX experience. It’s great on a big screen, but is likely just as much so in a standard movie theater. I’d have felt my money were better spent seeing this using my AMC subscription rather than shelling out an extra $21 for it.

Sure it’s illuminating, but is it worth a special trip?

Overall: B+

ELVIS

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C-
Music: B+

The most astonishing thing about Elvis is how a movie so long (159 minutes) could still be overstuffed—and somehow leave out crucial, well-documented details of the singer’s life. It barely mentions his movie career, which included over 30 film roles between 1956 and 1969. There is a depiction of Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), but no mention of the fact that she met Elvis when she was only fourteen and he was twenty-four. That wouldn’t be convenient for the depiction of Elvis Baz Luhrmann is going for—one of objective reverence, even in light of his infidelity and drug habits.

The second most astonishing thing about Elvis is that it’s biggest liability is, of all things . . . Tom Hanks. Why this script focuses so heavily on “Colonel Tom Parker,” as depicted by Hanks, is truly a mystery. Plenty of music biopics have adopted this framework of storytelling, with a person close in the star’s orbit telling the story, but Elvis feels just as much about Parker as it does about Elvis himself. And even by Luhrmann standards, Parker’s element feels like it’s a different movie, not least of which because Hanks is put into a poorly conceived “fat suit,” given a huge fleshy chin, and apparently encouraged to go with a Dutch accent far heavier than Parker reportedly actually spoke with. Everything about Hanks’s performance in this movie is a constant distraction, and never a good one—and yet the movie spends far too much time on him at the expense of relevant details in Elvis’s own life.

Is there a third most astonishing thing about Elvis? You bet there is! This movie addresses how so much of Elvis’s music was influenced by Black music and Black culture, but does it in a blatantly revisionist way. This movie would have us believe that Elvis Presley simply grew up in a poor white family in a predominantly black neighborhood, found success using the musical styles he was surrounded by, and the Black community was delighted by his success. This is demonstrably untrue. Now, no one would ever turn to a Baz Luhrmann film for historical accuracy, but this is egregious stuff, right there in “white savior” territory.

I’ve long said that the best biopics narrow their focus, on either a particular incident or at least a single period in a person’s life. Trying to tell a person’s entire life story in the space of just one movie—even a long movie—generally renders it dull, and Elvis is no exception, its frenetic editing notwithstanding. What’s more, this style is well suited to Luhrmann’s earlier work, most notably Moulin Rouge! (2001) but also Strictly Ballroom (1992) and even Romeo + Juliet (1996), those films being the only ones regarded as “classic” in Luhrmann’s filmography, even by Luhrmann fans. (Although a fair number seemed to enjoy The Great Gatsby in 2013; I wasn’t that impressed.) There’s something about Luhrmann’s style that sets the viewer at a remove from the story, never offering a chance to connect on a deeply emotional level—something that should really be possible in the telling of Elvis Presley’s story. Luhrmann was always more interested in visual innovations than emotional resonance, and his style is so recognizable now that it could hardly even be called innovative anymore.

In other words, Elvis would have been much improved if told by another director. Instead, we get a production depicting a quintessentially American figure that was filmed in Australia, exclusively on movie lots and with recognizable American landscapes and skylines rendered in obvious CGI. Luhrmann’s earlier films were set in obvious fantasy worlds, in which this sort of artifice worked for the story at hand.

But! All that said, Elvis does have some redeeming qualities, by far the most important of which is the performance of Austin Butler, who is eminently convincing as Elvis Presley. He has a naturally passing resemblance to the man, at least when he was young (oddly, Butler is never in any obvious fat suit when depicting “older, fatter Elvis”), and his actual singing voice is used in many of the performances. Butler has a magnetic screen presence, just as Elvis had a magnetic stage presence, and both of those facts are bizarrely obscured by telltale rapid-fire editing.

Elvis is also packed with music, though, and the music is almost uniformly great—at least when it’s classic Elvis tunes, as well as Black singers performing the songs Elvis later covered (those are arguably the best tacks on the soundtrack). Elvis does sprinkle in several contemporary tracks, often with rap vocals, as if in an attempt to acknowledge the lasting influence of Black music. The rap tracks are a bit misplaced, though. Honestly, someone should make a movie “about Elvis” that focuses on the Black artists who either “inspired” him or from whom he outright stole, depending on how you (or they) look at it.

Butler’s performance and the music throughout the movie are almost enough to make Elvis worth what is clearly made to be a theatrical experience rather than something viewed at home. Almost. It might well have gone all the way if there were less “Dutch Hanks” and a lot more of Butler, singing as well as acting (his performance is excellent).

It’s also hard not to wonder if this movie kind of missed the boat, having been released about twenty years too late. There were some clear Elvis fans in the row behind me at the theater, and they were deeply invested in the story, quite openly commenting on how they felt about certain characters’ behaviors, all of them depicting as hangers-on who were bringing down an otherwise innocent Elvis Presley. Huge fans of Elvis today, who would now almost exclusively be among the elderly set, will surely enjoy this movie. But, Elvis has not been an active part of the pop culture conversation in decades, and this movie could have found a lot larger audience back when more of his own fans were still alive.

In other words, Baz Luhrmann stopped far short of the greatness his movie Elvis could have been, and is offering it too late. Clearly I am not the only one who feels this way; the film has already grossed over $55 million worldwide, although with a budget of $85 million, it will likely barely break even, if even get to that point. I don’t regret having gone to see it, and found it moderately entertaining for what turned out to be far too long a time, but this is not re-watch material. The memory of this movie will get filed away in the back of my mind, in a drawer that never needs to be pulled open again.

You can’t look away . . . whenever he’s actually onscreen.

Overall: B-

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Makeup: B+

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is not garnering a lot of attention or box office receipts, and to be honest, it’s not all that much of a surprise. Even setting the quality of this film on its own terms aside, what possible relevance could Tammy Faye Bakker have to the current culture, easily forty years after the peak of her cultural cachet, and fourteen years after her death? Does anyone under the age of forty even remember her? I barely do, and even that’s only because of the famed cult documentary of the same name that was released in 2000, programmed as part of queer festivals, and focused far less on Jim Bakker and quite a bit more on her pointed support of the queer community—something I only learned from that documentary film, at the age of 24.

It may seem like a leap that this film brought to mind the recent Aretha Franklin biopic Respect. That film, also on its own terms, is no better or worse than The Eyes of Tammy Faye, but, crucially, it does far more easily justify its own existence. Aretha Franklin passed away far more recently (2018), her life’s work continues to have a profound impact on ongoing art and culture, and we can safely assume it will continue to for decades to come. None of these same things can be said of Tammy Faye Bakker, whose cultural influence at its peak was niche at best, and for the later years of her life she was unfortunately the largely unfair target of ridicule. This would have been due to her notoriously clownish makeup, the stereotype of her constantly crying, and just her general loopiness—which this current film suggests was largely due to prescription drug addictions.

The 2000 documentary set out to humanize her, and it did a pretty good job of it. This new, narrative film version of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, as directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick), clearly has the same intention. But, in 2021, how much does it even matter anymore? In 2000, Tammy Faye was still alive and vry much active; she was indeed an active participant in the filming process. What all this boils down to is, the current film is not just too little too late, but it is definitively redundant. You’d be far better off just seeking out. the original documentary—which, incidentally, is officially credited as the source material.

None of this is to say that this The Eyes of Tammy Faye is without any redeeming value, however. There’s always the unfortunate fact that more people are interested in narrative features than they are in documentary films—that documentary earned all of $1 million at the box office, after all, although the fact that the current film has earned all of $1.5 million 10 days into its run isn’t painting the greatest picture either. On the other hand, like it or not we are in the streaming era, and a fair number more people will will likely see it that way soon enough.

The best thing about this movie, actually, is the acting. Well, although Andrew Garfield has proved capable of greatness in many other parts, he is merely serviceable here as Jim Bakker, donning his own slightly distracting facial prosthetics and varied and evolving hairstyles through the many years this movie covers. Jessica Chastain, however, is legitimately impressive as Tammy Faye, somehow transcending the truly ridiculous amount of makeup and prosthetics. In fact she disappears into this part in a way she arguably never has before, achieving the aforementioned goal of humanizing the woman she plays.

It could even be argued she's too good at it. There are side-by-side stills at the end of the film, showing the actors playing their parts next to the real people they played. It's only when Chastain is seen up next to the real Tammy Faye that it's a little jarring. After sitting through that entire 126-minute movie, it becomes clear that Chastain actually dialed it down: Tammy Faye Bakker, to put it as sensitively as I can, was a truly nutty lady.

And the story we are privy to here, details the rise of the Bakkers as televangelists, their public marital problems, and their deep-dive fall from grace when Jim Bakker was indicted on charges of fraud, thereafter even serving a prison sentence. There are even allusions to secret gay affairs on the part of Jim, although the movie us never really straightforward about them. All we know, based on this movie anyway, is that Tammy Faye was along for the ride, largely oblivious, or perhaps more accurately, wilfully ignorant. The two are both massively materialistic, using their televised "ministry" as an excuse for their excesses, which build up in some ways independent of each other.

I enjoyed The Eyes of Tammy Faye for what it was, but still found myself wishing it were better. It could have been improved by, say, making direct connections between the lives of these two personalities and what the far-right in America has become today. But this movie isn't interested in that; it just wants us to be interested in their story, and to be impressed by the performance of it. I can give it that much, at least—and it's worth mentioning that Cherry Jones is also excellent as Tammy Faye's mother—but, in the end, it's still just not quite enough.

A great performance, still no substitute for the real thing.

Overall: B-

SIFF Advance: POTATO DREAMS OF AMERICA

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+

Potato Dreams of America is a locally produced film with a small budget, and it shows. I don’t say that to shit on it, because I actually enjoyed a lot of it, but I think it’s also a bit of fair warning, to viewers for whom that might be a barrier to entry into the story. And this is tricky, criticizing a movie that is a clear passion project by a writer-director who is telling an acutely personal, largely autobiographical story. There is no doubt that this film means a great deal to the people who worked on it, and especially writer-director Wes Hurley.

It’s certainly a story worth telling. There are just some challenges in execution, particularly in the first half, which is set in Vladivostok, the Russian west-coast city where the title character (as well as Hurley) is from. The production is highly stylized, giving it a feel rather like watching a well-designed local play. Unfortunately, with one notable exception, these “play” scenes are filled with supporting actors who give distractingly wooden performances.

The exception would be Lea LeLaria, easily the most famous person in this cast, here cast wildly against type as Potato’s uptight and conservative grandmother. She loses herself in the role so effectively, it took me a while before I even realized it was her. Still, these scenes could have used some tightening up in editing. Some of these scenes feel like Hurley decided he didn’t need very many takes. (For all I know, he didn’t have time for a lot of takes.) In one memorable shot, DeLaria’s grandma casually twirls a shotgun with her index finger, and the shot that’s used doesn’t even show it twirling very well. As a result, the vibe of the production becomes somewhat amateurish.

But, here’s a compelling concept: Hurley cast different actors for Potato’s family in Russia vs. his family in America, after he and his mother move to Seattle so his mother, Lena, can get married and in so doing escape post-Soviet Russia. Potato is much younger in the Vladivostok half of the film, and played by a boy named Hersh Powers; in the Seattle half, he’s played as an older teenager by a young man named Tyler Bocock. Bocock’s peformance is nuanced in a way unlike almost anyone else in the film, and he’s easily the best actor in it; I might even say he saves it. The woman who plays his unconditionally supportive mother, Lena, in Seattle (Marya Sea Kaminski), comes close.

Also, curiously, Lena and Potato speak with American accents in the Vladivostok half, and they speak with Russian accents in the Seattle half. This effectively highlights their “otherness” as a family unit in both contexts, although the delivery is more successful in the latter half.

“Potato,” incidentally, is just the nickname Lena has given him—one of the fictions added to an otherwise true story, according to Hurley just to help give himself some distance and see Potato as a character and not just as himself. There’s a bit of a shocking twist in the last act of the film regarding Potato’s American stepfather, which would be easy to dismiss as implausibly contrived, except apparently it’s actually part of his true story. There is a nice, organically multi-ethnic sense of intersectionality to Hurley’s story, with a bit of both lesbian and trans representation. Also, Potato’s circumstances are very specific, while the essence of his story, and its relatability, is universal. The semi-flamboyant imaginary-friend Jesus is a nice touch.

To be fair, some of the script, and particularly the dialogue, really is controvied—oversimplified representation of conservative talking points, particularly mirroring how they speak now rather than twenty or thirty years ago. (This is just my own pet peeve so I’ll forgive it, but a few shots of the Seattle skyline meant to be decades ago are clearly far too contemporary—but, we already established this is a small production. I’m sure there were no resources for making composite images of Seattle of the past.)

Potato Dreams of America isn’t quite as “quirky” as the title might suggest, although the film certainly does have its quirks. A lot of it, particularly in the first half, has some unrealized potential that bogs it down a little—but, by the end, it still spoke to me.

I’d like to see more of this potato.

Overall: B-