Delayed Reaction: Reversal of Fortune

Premise: Alan Dershowitz tries a case of the husband of a wealthy socialite accused of two attempted murders that left her in a coma.

 

I was very, very wrong about what this movie was. Based on the poster, cast, and stuffy title, I expected some kind of Merchant/Ivory stuffy costume drama. Jeremy Irons carries himself like a guy with a lot more of those in his filmography. Glen Close was just coming off the surprisingly fun Dangerous Liaisons. I was fully not expecting a legal drama.

 

All in all, it was a pretty good courtroom drama. It does a great job cataloging how Alan Deshowitz built his case. Irons' Claus von Bulow is an engaging and inscrutable defendant. The case is left up to interpretation just the right amount. I definitely appreciated it more that many other legal dramas from that era (Nuts, The Accused, Presumed Innocent). I'm perhaps being more generous to it than I would normally because of the pleasant surprise of finding out it was a different kind of movie than I expected.

 

I'm going to push back on the Jeremy Irons' Best Actor win some. It sure felt more like a prominent supporting performance to me. In a way that makes it more impressive that he could push himself to lead and still win. It's not exactly like I needed any of the other nominees to win instead. Perhaps a Kevin Coster win for Lead Actor that year would've opened things up for a Scorsese Goodfellas Director win that year instead. It's a shame that Born on the Fourth of July couldn't have come a year later so Tom Cruise could've won an Oscar. I'm getting a little too deep in the weeds though. Irons' win isn't quite as head scratching as Rami Malek's for Bohemian Rhapsody, but it sure isn't one of the banner wins in Oscar history. Neither an undeniable performance or a win for an actor who has paid his dues.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Three Colors: White

Premise: After being humiliated in his divorce hearings, and out-of-luck Polish hairdresser becomes a successful businessman to either get her back or get his revenge. Maybe both.

 

I'm still not that sure why Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy are such a touchstone of 90s World cinema, but I've seen them all now. They all have their own strengths, although White is easily my favorite of them. It's sort of a weird story. The first half or more plays like a Job story, then his rise and revenge happen quite quickly. It bothers me how much Zbigniew Zamachowski reminded me of Michael Weston. (No? That's just me? Oh well, I still stand by it) I sometimes forget how stunning mid-90s Julie Delpy was*. I don't have much else to say about her here, since she doesn't get much else to do. Her last scene from the prison cell is pretty touching though.

 

*To me fair, 2020 Delpy still looks great. Just 2 years until another Before movie, I hope.

 

I don't know that I'm that convinced to track down Kieslowski's other films, but I do like having the Three Colors monkey off my back.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Other Half

Premise: A man starts dating a woman who turns out to be bipolar and he learns to navigate that.

 

Sometimes you just need to watch a Tatiana Maslany movie. That is 100% of the reason I watched this. I didn't even know who else was in it or what it was about. Frankly, Maslany has earned that. As I figured out what the movie was about, I thought, surely after playing a dozen characters on Orphan Black, she could pull off one character with big swings in personality. It turns out, she could. That's all you need to know, really. If you want to watch 1r43m of Maslany being pretty good in something, here you go.

 

I can't say anything else about the movie stuck with me. It's really Tom Cullen's movie. He's great in the movie Weekend. He didn't really stick out in this though. It's sort of a less interesting version of the same character. Most of the time the movie followed him without Maslany, I just wanted it to bring Maslany back.

 

The movie sort of just ends. Or maybe I simply wasn't that interested in it by then. It's hard to say. As I said, you really should let your fandom of Maslany decide for you if you should give this a chance. It's a bummer of a movie a lot of the time. Maslany is giving a capital 'P' Performance that, in the hands of a different filmmaker, movie, and distributor could've got an Oscar push. The rest of the movie is there to support her performance, which is a bit of a problem since she isn't really the lead.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: After Hours

Premise: A yuppie goes through a series of misadventures over one long New York night.

 

Odyssey movies are some of the easiest movies to get right. The formula is so simple. Give a character a mission. Create a path with as many nonsensical side missions as you want. Create a bunch of fun characters. And make whatever random connections to all the characters and stories that you want. I complain a lot about contrivance in movies. That thing where a writer gets lazy and forces a connection that isn't plausible, just because it manufactures story easier. That isn't really a concern in an Odyssey movie. Contrivance is part of the fun.

 

In a city as large are New York, Griffin Dunne runs into the same robbers multiple times. His $20 bill ends up on the paper mache statue in the apartment he goes to. The girl he came to this part of the city for is also dating the bartender he exchanges keys with. It's all ridiculous, but it works because that's the kind of movie this is.

 

This isn't the best Martin Scorsese movie out there. I think he makes movies on occasion just to prove that he can do it. Hugo is his family movie. Cape Fear is his scary movie. After Hours was his straightforward comedy (The King of Comedy is more dark than funny in my book). After Hours is mostly successful, although it never quite reached laugh out loud funny. The closest I really came to laughing was from the certainty I was about to laugh when I saw Catherine O’Hara.

 

While I like Griffin Dunne as a less likely Scorsese lead, I did feel a little deprived of star power in this. Scorsese is best when he has a couple Oscar nominees on board. I'm not sure this cast has any*. Like, Tom Hanks could've knocked this out of the park instead of Dunne. Perhaps getting Willem Dafoe for Tom the Bartender would've hit too serious a tone. This really felt like more of a side project of Scorsese; like some time opened up on his schedule and he thought it would be fun to try.

 

*I checked. Just one for Teri Garr unless you want count Dunne's for producing a Live-Action Short. I didn't find any others.

 

All that said, the movie was still very watchable and zipped right along. Scorsese has yet to make a movie I've seen that I thought was a miss.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Days of Heaven

Premise: Two lovers, posing as brother and sister, working manual labor on a farm find themselves in a love triangle when the wealthy owner of the farm falls for and marries the woman.

 

I'm not a Terrence Malick fan. I'm not adversarial about him the way I often am with directors like David Lynch or Wes Anderson though. I feel like I see the appeal and dismiss it as not for me. He's made it pretty easy to dismiss him too. He's got the reclusive genius thing where he won't make a movie for 10-20 years. In recent years, he's taken to making "people twirling in a field" movies that somehow don't exist despite having stacked casts. My stance is that I'm glad actors like being in his movies and if some people want to call his films masterpieces, more power to them.

 

My opinion is that he makes gorgeous failures. His movies are all technically beautiful. If there's ever a movie that needs a scene set in a wheat field at sunset, I hope he gets the first call. I call the movies failures because they either don't make sense or have to be rebuilt in editing. You could make almost an entirely different movie out of all the scenes and actors cut out of The Thin Red Line. Days of Heaven was in the editing room for two years before a narration had to be added to make it work. The only reason he's been able to make so many movies in the last decade is because he's given up on the editing portion and decided that people will get it or they won't. I don't get the sense from Malick that any of the movies he's released are actually the movies he envisioned when he filmed them.

 

All that said, I kind of like Days of Heaven. It's only about 90 minutes, so even if it got self-indulgent, it was over quickly. The plot is very coherent. I don't know Brooke Adams well, but I'm all about mid 70s Richard Gere and Sam Shepard. The move does look beautiful. That location for Malick is like bringing a fish to water. I also really loved Ennio Morricone's score. In particular I loved the sampling of "Aquarium" from The Carnival of Animals. That music is mesmerizing. I'm shocked that it's not the music used for every scene in movies where someone stumbles onto something majestic.

 

The one negative note I made while watching this was "the little sister's narration is unwell." I don't know if Linda Manz was doing a dialect or if that's how she really talks, but something about her narration sounded like a stage kid trying too hard to sound a certain way. It didn't sound natural, and given how much narration there is throughout, that got distracting.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Somewhere

Premise: A Hollywood star drifts through life while occasionally watching his daughter.

 

When it comes to Sofia Coppola, you have to meet her at her level or it becomes easy to dismiss her. That's true of a lot of directors. Chris Nolan loves puzzles and excuses to not humanize his characters. Richard Curtis is sentimental and only wants to look at the world generously. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are overly concerned with how friendships can exist after going through personal growth. Coppola does reflect a lot on the malaise of living a privileged life. For that reason, many people look at her movies, say they are just about sad rich white people, and use that as an excuse to disengage with her work. I get it. If you've had your fill of that kind of movie, expecting you to watch one of her movies isn't likely to change your mind. That's not an excuse to call them bad movies though.

 

Accepting that I'm watching a Sofia Coppola movie, I enjoyed Somewhere quite a bit. It's similar to Lost in Translation in a lot of ways. It's also about a famous actor who is going through the motions of his life. The key difference is that it's a father-daughter relationship at the center. Stephen Dorff is one of those actors who I recognize but I don't know why. I sort of just assume he's had some sort of fall from grace or self-inflicted career setbacks, but from what I can tell, he's just a working actor. Pretty boring. It makes him pretty perfect for this kind of role. We've had a decade now of Elle Fanning seemingly surprising people with how good she is in every movie, so it's not a surprise to realize looking back, that she was this good when she was 12.

 

I really love how patient this movie is. It sits with scenes for a while. There's not a ton of dialogue. Since there's very little actual plot, most of the communication is conveyed by the simple fact that she's showing us a scene at all. The movie felt a little thin for me to call it one of Sofia Coppola's best movies. Instead, it's a reminder that she's incredibly consistent. I don't think I've seen of a movie of hers that's bad. Timeline-wise, Somewhere really does fit neatly between Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Ned Kelly

Premise: The story of Australian Jesse James.

 

I miss Heath Ledger. He was so fun to watch. At the time of his death, he was certainly my favorite actor and I've never been bored by him in a movie. I actually have quite a few of his movies left to see, and that's somewhat intentional. I like the idea of always having a Casanova or The Order to see if rewatching A Knight's Tale or The Dark Knight isn't doing it for me. Ned Kelly was a big one to check off my list. Not because it's a particularly great movie. It just had a great cast. There are so many Australians in this, from Joel Edgerton to Naomi Watts to Georfrey Rush. I'll forgive Orlando Bloom for not being Australian, because his 2003 was an epic year (The Return of the King and the first Pirate of the Caribbean movie in addition to this). I'm disappointed they couldn't fit Rose Byrne in somehow, but that just means I can look forward to the Byrne/Ledger pairing in Two Hands even more.

 

Really, the best thing about the movie is how Australian it is. There's that cast. The movie constantly uses B-roll of the exotic and distinctive wildlife in that country. I love Westerns not set in America because they look almost alien. Like, this came out around the same time as American Outlaws and it's a vastly more interesting movie just by being Australian. Similarly, I'm completely unaware of the story of Ned Kelly, so I didn't know where this was going. Had you told me it was ending with a shootout where Ned Kelly's gang dresses in makeshift armor, I would've said "Well, that part was made up by a producer with an imagination". So, uh, that was an interesting Wikipedia page to go through later.

 

Now, I am curious what the Australian opinion of this movie is. Is it the equivalent of an American watching an American Western or is America so synonymous with the Western* that it's even refreshing for Australians to see this spin on the genre? Frankly, I'm not tracking down enough Australian cinema to know.

 

*To be fair, the name "Western" refers to the American Wild West. The U.S. claims ownership of a lot of things that aren't ours, but the Western really is ours.

 

I wish there were a hundred more Ned Kellys in Heath Ledger's filmography. It's not a great movie. At best, it's functional. But it's watchable with a strong cast. Most days, that's more than enough.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Bloody Sunday

Premise: A boots-on-the-ground recreation of the events of Bloody Sunday in Ireland.

 

While I can certainly see some of the elements of his filmmaking that he brought to the Bourne franchise, Bloody Sunday is definitely the ramp up to Paul Greengrass making United 93. It has the same eye-level aesthetic. The actors are mostly unknown. It's hectic and isn't concerned with tidy editing. It's a shame he hasn't figured out how to use this for happy stories. Like, where's "Hands '86", the story of Hands Across America? (which did solve hunger or AIDS or whatever, by the way) Instead, he's always making these about spree killings in Norway, the cruelest twist of the knife on 9/11, or the deadliest event of the Troubles. Frankly, it's shocking that he isn't even a producer on a Columbine movie. Is Captain Phillips really his most optimistic movie?

 

While it isn't Greengrass' first movie, Bloody Sunday is the one he built his reputation on, and it's easy to see why. It's also easy to see how he's grown as a filmmaker. I appreciate how cheaply and simply the film is made. None of the actors look familiar to me, so that worked in its favor. It's actually pretty impressive that he didn't stumble onto a James McAvoy, even by accident, in this. I appreciate the sense of confusion throughout. When you factor in the Irish accents, without subtitles and a Wikipedia article, I would've been totally lost. Some of the most violent scenes are almost mundane. Like, the initial shots fired are easy to miss entirely.

 

The editing of the movie is interesting. It's full of repeated quick fades, which feels a lot more measured. He could've done this exactly the same but with fast cuts. It would've been too chaotic though. I like this choice. I'd love to know how this was shot and edited. How intentionally were all the scenes and cuts? Were all of these scenes shot specifically, or was there a ton of coverage that they pieced together? I suspect there could've easily been a 4-hour cut of this. Much of the movie does a good job showing the confusion all-around. I think it could've done a better job of tracking the army's perspective later on. There's a point where it just stops trying to get in their heads that's a little frustrating. Perhaps that's intentional, since it isn't really clear why the discharged so many rounds. Bloody Sunday isn't the gut punch that the first hour of 22 July and the entirety of United 93 is, but it's still an impressive movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Charlie Countryman

Premise: A young man impulsively travels to Bucharest after the death of his mother and immediately runs into trouble.

 

Here's the danger of going by the cast as a motivation to see a movie. You don't actually know how much anyone is used or how they are used. You only know to look out for familiar faces. I picked Charlie Countryman because of a really impressive list of names in the cast. And that was misleading. Aubrey Plaza and Vanessa Kirby have blink-and-you'll-miss-them roles. Especially Plaza who must've had a larger part that was cut down to nearly nothing. Vincent D'Onofrio only shows up shortly. Melissa Leo shows up at least a couple times. The cast is still pretty good though, just not stacked. This came out at the height of Shia LaBeouf as performance art. Evan Rachel Wood gets a fun accent, which I'm sure she enjoyed. This was right before Mads Mikkelsen got more than European heavy roles. I love Rupert Grint's oddball post-Harry Potter career. He hasn't made anything great, but it's the filmography of a guy who really doesn't give a fuck about what other people think. The guy is just having fun, in random bit roles if he wants.

 

This movie is both thin and a lot. It's over-directed. I didn't need to look up that this is Fredrik Bond's feature directorial debut because that fact is all over the movie with the insistence on making the director's presence known. There's a type of debut director that seems to be constantly asking, "what would look cool?" Charlie Countryman is a lot of that. Cool camera techniques. Cool locations. Cool sequences. And I'm often left wondering, "OK, but why?" I lost track of what was going on at one point and never felt the need to catch back up. I know there was some mix of threats posed by Nigel (Mikkelsen) and Darko (Til Schweiger). No one seemed to want Charlie (LaBeouf) and Gabi (Evan Rachel Wood) to end up together. It's the sort of movie where plot just happens to the main character repeatedly. I mean, it's set off by Charlie randomly deciding to go to Bucharest and the man sitting next to him dying. To put it in Stranger Than Fiction terms, that's the wrecking ball coming through Harold's wall.

 

Still, I did sort of like bits of the movie. Shia LeBeouf is engaging to watch. It's a shame that his childhood did such a number on him, because if that charisma and talent could've been tied to a more normal childhood, he probably really would be a bonafide movie star now. Pairing him with Wood is smart, because both like being provocateurs. With a filmmaker who could more clearly express her/his vision, they'd be great in something genuinely unique. And yes, I am aware that aspects of this movie were cut in ways that were out of the director's control. Some moments of this movie are fun. I enjoyed getting caught up in the Sundance messiness of it all. The movie takes a lot of big swings with magical realism and soundtrack choices that don't always work. I appreciate the ambition even though I don't care for the final product.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: From Here to Eternity

Premise: Three army soldiers deal with personal romances and struggles in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

 

I've seen most of the great Best Picture winners already. I found an excuse to see Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, All About Eve, The Godfather, and all the other stone-cold classics earlier because they've stood the test of time. My current project, filling in the gaps, has meant tracking down a lot of Best Picture winners that haven't remained as evergreen. In 50 years, that would mean I'm watching the Green Books and Crashes. It also means I'm watching the American Beauties and English Patients: movies that were critically adored and reflective of the values of the Academy at the time. That's what From Here to Eternity is. These days, it's almost exclusively remembered for that shot on the beach as Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss as the tide comes in. Otherwise, you may recall Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed winning Oscars. I get why the movie was a hit at the time. I also didn't really care for it now.

 

I mean, I didn't not like it. I just wasn't blown away by it the way people were in 1953. I like the idea of this story taking place with the Pearl Harbor attack looming. It's fun knowing that all these interpersonal dramas can become moot whenever that attack happens. The cast is stacked, even though, if I'm being honest, I'm still not sure which character is Burt Lancaster and which is Montgomery Clift. I immediately recognized Frank Sinatra. Apparently, this was surprising casting at the time and people went wild for the performance. Umm, sure. He's fine. I prefer a more natural performance, but Sinatra fits with the style of the era. I'll think of this as a Monique type of win.

 

This is what I'd imagine if you asked me to describe a Best Picture winner in 1953. It's exists in the shadow of WWII. It has romance that's chaste with a hint of scandal. It features a lot of studio players and comes out very pro-America. This is a Hollywood Blacklist Best Picture winner if I ever saw one, so even if I'm not wild about the movie, I'm happy to have it as a signifier of where the industry was at the time.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend