In Manohla Dargis‘s rave N.Y. Times review of Killers of the Flower Moon, she claims that Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone “work beautifully together, their different performance styles — Ernest is physically demonstrative while Mollie is reserved — creating a contrapuntal whole.
“[So] you believe in these characters but also, crucially, you believe them as a couple and in the tenderness of their love. You watch them settle into each other’s bodies in bed and, at other times, lean into each other so that their foreheads touch, as if to silently share their thoughts.”
Friendo on Dargis’s review: “There are a couple of lines in the review that are almost high camp. Example: ‘Scorcese is not boxed in by obvious narrative cues, and neither are you. That means that you’re never sure where the story is headed or why.’ You can say that again!”
One of the tenets of any mainstream romcom is attractiveness. The leads have to be not only hot and fuckable but admirable in other ways — quick, clever, possessed by robust spirit, funny, open-hearted, etc. Glenn Powell, 35, meets the criteria but Sidney Sweeney, 26, doesn’t. She’s an interesting actress (I hadn’t really studied her until I saw Reality) but she’s kinda mousey looking…dweeby, flat attitude, more peculiar than conventionally sexy.
The rich visual spank in Fred Zinnemann‘s Oklahoma! — 70mm Todd-AO, 30-frames-per-second — is so luscious that I decided to watch some of it last night. The first 35 or 40 minutes, I mean. Watching the whole film is impossible — talk about square, complacent, cornball, plodding.
But those Arizona visuals! Location shooting was done mostly in Nogales, Arizona. The cornfield in the opening number as well as the reprise song “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” were shot at the historic Canoa Ranch in Green Valley, Arizona.
Oklahoma! itself is a glaze-over, for the most part. You sit and watch it, and it sure as hell goes on longer than you’d prefer. The tunes catch lightning every so often. I really enjoyed Rod Steiger and Gordon Macrae‘s “Poor Judd is Dead” duet.
If only there wasn’t this feeling of complacency, of an overly revered stage play being shot by cameras that weight ten tons, of the filmmakers coasting on the laurels of the original 1943 Broadway stage production, which (along with the earlier production of Jerome Kern‘s Showboat) changed the character and upped the game of American musicals.
If only the Curly-Laurey-Judd triangle made a lick of sense. If only the photography wasn’t so conservative and the cutting so uninquisitive. If only Laurey’s dream sequence didn’t use replacement dancers for Macrae and Shirley Jones (why were they even hired if they couldn’t handle a few modest ballet moves?). If only it didn’t seem as if director Fred Zinneman was on a Thorazine drip and wearing a straightjacket during filming. If only those jutting Arizona mountain peaks (i.e., total fiction compared to the typography of the real Oklahoma) weren’t visible in all the exteriors.
Incidentally: Did you know that Oklahoma!, despite its staunch mid-1950s squareness, is all about sexual longing and mating rituals and perversity, and is generally teeming with erections and dampness and pelvic thrusts?
“There’s a storehouse of sexual activity swarming in Oklahoma!,” he writes, “and enough to fill several ten-page papers. In overview, however, it suffices to note the several main themes in the film: the cloaking of continual sexual pursuit beneath local custom and chivalry, the dependency of each character on that custom, the matriarchal presence of the [lascivious] Aunt Eller and the…sexual linkage of beasts and dancing as they relate to Oklahoma!‘s setting and genre.
In those themes alone there is enough to give any Rodgers and Hammerstein fan pause as she or he considers Oklahoma!‘s innate sexuality and perversity.”
Nobody wants George Clooney‘s The Boys in the Boat (Amazon/MGM, 12.25) to turn out well more than myself. Clooney is a genuinely decent and likable fellow and we all believe in the adage about good things happening to good people. Lamentably, of the eight films he’s directed over the last 22 years ony one — Good Night, and Good Luck — was an A-plus submission. I don’t what the bpockage might be but Clooney somehow fumbled the other seven — Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Leatherheads, The Ides of March, The Monuments Men, Suburbicon, The Midnight Sky and The Tender Bar.
Let’s hope against hope that The Boys in the Boat breaks the streak.
In Killers of the Flower Moon (which I’ll be seeing for the second time later today) the yokelish scumbag Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) romances and then marries the oil-rich Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). There’s a strange implication that Ernest is actually sweet on Mollie, but that’s bullshit. He’s mainly after her money.
The problem is that there’s no believing that Leo is genuinely attracted to Lily. Because we can’t divest ourselves of a persistent social-media impression of Leo over the last 25 years or so, which is that he only goes out with foxy, super-slender supermodels who are 25 or younger. Lily is a nice-looking lady as far as it goes, but she’s not in Leo’s class. She’s moonfaced, in her mid 30s and a bit on the chubby side. You tell yourself “no, no….forget real-life Leo…he’s playing an actual Oklahoma guy who married Mollie back in the 1920s…you need to invest in his performance and forget his real-life escapades.” And you can’t. You just can’t.
Prior to yesterday’s announcement about the passing of Burt Young, I was honestly under a vague impression that he had passed 10 or 15 years ago.
I’m not saying this disrespectfully — I had just come to believe that Young, 83, had breathed his last during the Obama administration, or even before that. Somehow that driving-and-coughing death scene in that Sopranos episode (he played Bobby Baccalieri‘s cancer-ridden dad) had lodged in my memory as the real thing, or an omen of same.
Oh, and Young’s Chinatown character (“Curly”) wasn’t a “rotten client” of Jack Nicholson “Jake Gittes”, as THR’s Mike Barnesdescribedhimyesterday. Curly was actually a decent schlubby guy from Long Beach who helped Jake out in a pinch.
Young’s second most vivid performance was as “Bed Bug Eddie” in ThePope ofGreenwichVillage (‘84).
I know he played “Paulie” in all those Rocky movies, of course, but those were mostly paycheck gigs. Okay, the first one (in the 1976 John Avildsen-directed original) wasn’t — Young actually derived a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination out of that effort.
