Kenneth Branagh’s wildly over-praised Belfast is similar to Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma in three respects — black-and-white cinematography, focus on a family, violent political conflict affecting the basic climate.

The difference is that Branagh seems afraid of turning off the cinematic low-brows with a sudden plunge into monochrome, so he begins his 1969 tale in the glorious digital present, showing Belfast’s brilliant colors and upgraded commercial center, all spiffy and rockin’ to some punchy tune.

Only after the audience has been sated with the colorful safety of now for two full minutes does Branagh summon the resolve to commit to black-and-white and the Belfast that once was.

Cuaron, of course, started his film in monochrome from the get-go and stayed with it.

Initially written during Monday’s 858–mile marathon, re–edited and tweaked in West Hollywood on Tuesday morning: On Sunday night (9.5) I finally caught Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and there’s no question that it’s brilliant and (I mean this respectfully) oddly hateful in a chilly sort of way.

It’s a visual knockout on a shot-by-shot basis. but except for a scene or two featuring Jeffrey Wright it refuses to provide any sort of narrative tissue or emotional connection with the characters. It’s all arch attitude, snide-ironic voice-overs and deadpan expressions, and after a while it makes you intensely angry. That or your spirit wilts or you become weak in the knees.

The French Dispatch is a bullwhip immersion in hardcore, doubled-down Wes. It’s not that there’s no way “in” as much as there isn’t the slightest interest in offering any kind of common humanity element.

So much so that I began to wonder if Wes might be going through a phase vaguely similar to Jean-Luc Godard’s Marxist-Maoist revolutionary period (‘68 to ‘79). I ask because it’s a pure head-trip objet d’art — there’s no sense whatsoever that Dispatch is looking to engage on any kind of semi-accessible level, even to the extent of reaching people like me.

It’s so mannered and wry and rapid-fire ironic that it sucks the oxygen right out of your lungs.

That said, I loved the boxy (1.37:1) cinematography. I was also kind of wondering why Wes didn’t use 1.66:1 more often. (I’m actually not sure he used it at all.). It seemed to be about 85% boxy and 15% widescreen scope (2.4:1).

For me the most humanly relatable moment doesn’t involve Wright’s character. It happens, rather, during the 1968 sequence that costars Frances McDormand as a Dispatch staffer writing about the fevered climate of French student revolt. Asked if writing is a lonely, isolating profession, McDormand answers “sometimes.”

There’s no chance that anyone this fall will even flirt with the concept of Dispatch being worthy of above-the-line Oscar noms — at best it could land some for production design, costumes, makeup, editing.

Again, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond:

Pretty much all of your sharper, tougher Telluride critics have problems with Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. The more obliging middle-of-the-road types (critics, columnists and industry folk alike) have oddly fallen for it.

You can’t grab people by the lapels and order them to have a sense of taste about such matters. If someone likes Belfast or finds it Oscar-worthy, okay — shrug and throw your hands up. But when someone says Belfast is “one of the best films [they’ve] ever seen,” all kinds of crazy reactions come to mind. Because it’s fair, I believe, to compare Belfast’s family dynamic with that of Fred Savage and The Wonder Years, as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich did today.

Either you’re the type who can tolerate or, God forbid, embrace cloying emotionalism, or you aren’t..

From a 9.5 Deadline column by Pete Hammond:

Jean-Paul Belmondo has passed at age 88. No strenuous sorrows as he persevered for nearly nine decades, and lived a much fuller and more colorful life than the norm.

Belmondo’s career was launched by his starring role in Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless (’60). How good is that 61-year-old film, really? I would say more “fleetingly iconic” than great. The adoration that Belmondo’s character, Michel, felt for the tough-guy manner of Humphrey Bogart — that’s what sticks in the mind. Particularly his Bogartian facial expressions as he lies dying on a street in Paris. Right before he’s shot, Michel says “I’m tired…I want to sleep.” An odd sentiment at such a young age — a natural or not unexpected thing to say at age 88.

Read more

Jane Campion‘s interesting but doleful, somewhat irksome The Power of the Dog (Netflix, 11.17) is a respectable smarthouse effort. An intelligent, solemn, very well acted (especially by Benedict Cumberbatch), at times fascinating period drama.

In a nutshell, it’s a somewhat rugged, rather grim 1920s western about repressed homosexuality. No fist fights, no gunshots, etc. And clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker.

But it wasn’t for me. I knew that within minutes. Netflix will begin streaming it on 11.17.21.

I wish I had more time but I don’t. Two more films today — The Automat (a doc) and The French Dispatch.

Cumberbatch is really quite the self-torturing closet case, but he and Jesse Plemons are cast as brothers, and there’s really no way to believe this. They’re both red-haired (Plemons is more of a lighter carrot shade) but there the vague resemblance ends. The common genetic heritage simply isn’t there. Was one adopted?

Cumberbatch is lean and sinewy; Plemons is a moon-faced marshmallow with small eyes, and conveying a certain patience and gentleness of spirit. But he and BC don’t even look like second cousins.

As the film begins the Burbank brothers (Phil and George) share a bedroom in their mansion-sized home…curious.

Plemons is bulkier than Phillip Seymour Hoffman in The Master and slightly less ample than John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. He’s playing a wealthy cattle broker, but there’s no believing that plump Plemons could be part of any aspect of the cattle business. The trust factor goes right out the window.

The older-looking Kirsten Dunst, 39, delivers the second best performance, right after Cumberbatch.

To me watching this felt like work; it made me feel vaguely trapped. I walked out scratching my head and muttering “what?” I wrote three friends who’ve seen it to try and clarify a third-act plot element.

That’s it, time’s up, gotta go.

Bernard McMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin, which I saw late last night, is a pleasing, at times rousing doc about a great ’60s and ’70s band. It plants a grin on your face, gets your foot tapping and delivers ecstatic memory throttles from time to time. Speaking as a longtime Zep fan, I was happy fine with it as far as it went.

Twenty words: It’s highly enjoyable but a bit under-nourishing due to control-freak conditions imposed by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

Becoming starts out fine and then it gets really good once the band starts playing gigs. But then the lack of texture and honesty by way of varied viewpoints becomes more and more noticable as it goes along and especially during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

This is an agreeable, enjoyable rock doc, but it’s too sanitized. Dishonest by way of omission. But I still liked it.

The first hour relates the individual paths of the three remaining Zeppers, and straight from the mouths — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones (all currently in their 70s and in good spirits) as well as the late John Bonham, who is heard speaking to a journalist about this and that.

The second hour is about the launch of Led Zeppelin — the early play dates, the creation of the first two albums, the acclaim, the power and the glory. It’s basically about good times, and there’s nothing “wrong” with that.

The problem is that it doesn’t dig in. It’s not even slightly inquisitive. It’s way too obliging, almost feeing like an infomercial at times. It offers, in short, a really restricted portrait, and around the 110-minute mark I started to mind this.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review:

I still haven’t seen William Greaves’ Symbiopyschotaxiplasm, but I’d honestly like to. Has anyone?

Filed yesterday by World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy:

Also:

I’ve been venting for many months about the 5’5” Kristen Stewart being too short to play the 5’10” Princess Diana. Well, guess what? Director Pablo Larrain and his crew have somehow obscured this issue brilliantly. Stewart somehow looks tall and leggy, and damned if my size-ist reservations didn’t fly right out the window. Hats off.

… on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Alas, not directed by Pedro Almodovar.

Pablo Larrain’s Spencer (Neon, 11.5) is a simplistic, impressionistic head-trip film…a “poor free-spirited, pheasant-sympathizing, pearl necklace-loathing Diana vs. the cold, bloodless gargoyle royals” bullshit borefest.

A British critic has called it a “magnificent farce.” I’m sorry but that’s an absurd claim. It’s a surreal mindscape movie that has a half-decent singalong ending (“All I Need Is A Miracle”) but otherwise pretty much stays in the same place start to finish. It’s a kind of nightmarish Stepford Wives (or wife) in the country.

Kristen Stewart will be Best Actress nominated, I’m presuming. The narrative has already been written, right? The movie is appalling but she’s very good at what she’s been asked to do — let’s just leave it at that. Her Diana speaking voice is breathy and whispery and hard to understand, but that’s okay. We enjoy being in the dark about certain things.

Stewart plays the mad, close-to-cracking-up Diana to the unstable-adolescent-teenager, Julie Harris in The Haunting hilt — beset by visions & nightmares & the ghost of Anne Boleyn.

Spencer follows the wokester narrative that white elitism is evil and rancid and needs to be resisted at all costs. Because Diana needs to breathe, love, live, talk to pheasants and save her sons from those toxic royal traditions and soul-smothering attitudes.

Time and again and through Diana’s eyes, we see the royal family as frigid monsters. I was actually thinking back to The Ruling Class (’72) and Peter O’Toole’s “Mad Jack” impressions of the House of Lords being filled with decaying corpses.

But it’s all one note with no real shifting of tone or pace, and is mostly about gowns and servants and crates of delicious food and vast lawns and the shooting of skeet and birds by fine gentlemen… it’s a fairly monotonous film, I’m telling you. It’s weirdly trippy but it just lies there. Really.

In a sense Spencer is the return of Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie — another meditative, interior dialogue–y, “woe is me because I’m drowning in sadness” thing.

Welcome to the kingdom of morose moods and impressions…Diana’s tears and bulimia and resentments and escape fantasies.

What a flat, one-note, boring-ass hallucinatory downer by way of a character study (or is it the other way around?).

I didn’t care about poor Diana’s anguish at all…she’s unhappy amidst all the opulence and regimentation? Tough shit, girl…get shut of it, shut it out, drop it like a bad habit, whatever.

Life is hard, Diana, but you romanced and maneuvered your way into the royal family, and I’m sure you’ll figure some way to divorce Charles and snag your $22 million settlement and handsome monthly expense check & so on…you’ll be fine.

”Please, Lord…I wanted to be Charles’ wife but now I feel stifled and unloved and unable to follow the usual, par-for-the-course protocols…I need to be free so I can order some KFC with the boys.”

Watching it felt like an eternity. I was shaking my head time and again. Nope, doesn’t work, “what?”, c’mon.

Why exactly is there a tender lesbian moment when Sally Hawkins’ maid tells Diana that she loves her? (In response to which Diana more or less goes “oh, wow!”). Arriving near the end of Act Three, Hawkins’ confession is a non-starter and therefore mystifying. Why even bring it up?

We’re told that Diana’s childhood home (Althorp House in Northhamptonshire) is walking distance from Sandringham House, the Queen’s grand Norfolk residence and the site of a 1991 Christmas celebration — the film’s central setting. Diana Spencer spent 15 or 20 years growing up in this region, and yet, according to the film’s opening scene, she gets lost trying to drive to Sandringham herself? Doesn’t make a bit of basic sense. (The residences are actually about 100 miles apart, or roughly a two-hour drive.)

The film is a psychological dreamscape and therefore not bound by history or geography, but why defy reality to this extent?

Plus the overly aggressive air-conditioning in the Galaxy was giving me pneumonia.

9.5 update (7:20 am): I posted an initial draft of this review in some haste yesterday afternoon. I’ve since given it a polish.

Read more