BLOCKBUSTERS
BLOCKBUSTER MUSICAL MAKES ENTERTAINMENT
A time before the Wizard of OZ was a happier time, if one can believe the existence of betterness than Judy Garland, The Tin Man, The Lion and the Scarecrow endlessly singing whimsically down and around the yellow brick road.
Director Jon M. Chu merges the best of a Broadway musical with the best of Tinseltown imaging for the prequel to Dorothy getting swept up by a tornado in Kansas and winding up in the Land of Oz.
The magical singing of leading costars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, sets the tone and provides the atmosphere, and gradually pulls the audience into the 3D dreamscape enhanced with AVX theater technology.
Cynthia Erivo plays Elphaba Throp, a young women born with a green skin and spontaneous uncontrolled magical powers. Elphaba is the prequel to the prequel of how the Wicked Witch of the West comes to be wicked. The short answer is that she gets teased a lot growing up and this teasing only becomes more sophisticated when she enters Shiz University.
Ariana Grande plays Galinda Upland, a young woman who wants to learn sorcery. But Galinda’s perky narcissistic tendencies put her in direct competition with Elphaba. Galinda is the prequel to Glinda the Good, who must become a bit nicer before wearing the title.
This one main narrative of how the witches in Oz came to be is filled with song and dance. The storyline is made a bit more complicated than Dorothy’s was in the Wizard of Oz (1939).
Chu intermittently runs background narratives through the main narrative, like the twisting winds of a tornado. One narrative involves an authoritarian plot to remove all the magical animal professors from teaching at the university. Galinda actually joins her classmates in bullying the professors before they are permanently removed from their teaching positions.
Another narrative involves the developing romance between Galinda and a prince from Winkie, played by Jonathan Bailey.
The Wizard of Oz narrative runs blindly in the background until Elphaba gets a special invitation to meet him at Oz. Michelle Yeoh, plays Madame Morrible, a professor of sorcery who has mentored Elphaba in the background. Madame Morrible knows that Oz has room for a particularly talented student, if she can find one for him.
The relationships of the students grow as would typically happen in a competitive academic environment. But no one could guess that Elphaba and Galinda would begin to work together.
Wicked has that majestic sweep of a blockbuster, and also the bursting talent of a long running Broadway musical.
Erivo matches her acting talent with her accomplished singing. And Grande is able to dance and sing in parallel, often in the whimsical spirit of her character being in binary opposition. Galinda is popular but obnoxious at the same time, while Elphaba is unpopular, which compels her through a bit of a challenging rollercoaster of emotions.
Wicked is a fun filled night of entertainment with a 2 h 40 minute runtime, that is well worth the effort.
And then just when enough happiness has occurred, and the realization sets in that time has gone by, Chu introduces the interestingly quirky character, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, played by Jeff Goldbloom. Goldbloom adapts his supporting screen character well for the role as, similar to the Wizard of Oz (1939), the storms slow down enough to allow time for some explaining about what is going on in Tornado Alley and other magical stories from Kansas.
INVISIBLE STRINGS MAGICALLY CREATE CHANGE
Director Francis Ford Coppola captures the gently falling fragments of his consciousness in assembling the fable, Megalopolis (2024).
This metaphysical film figurately and literally transcends time and space. The didactic script relies on symbols and metaphors as much as plot lines and character development to tell the story of America’s decline.
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are cast in the film after the two young actors co-starred in the urban dystopia Midnight Cowboy (1969) about two down out players struggling to survive in a ruthless New York City.
In Megalopolis, the much aged players have finally succeeded at the end of their time, but all around them, the city has fallen into disrepair.
Coppola becomes a harbinger for the empire’s downfall, having waited five decades to finally tell the final chapter of the American story now that everything has become so clearly revealed.
Essentially, Americans dressing and acting as if in ancient Roman times preside over the downfall of New York City, I mean the City of New Rome.
Laurence Fishburne provides a voice over while also being cast in the role as the lead character’s aide-de-camp, in a kind of reimagined character composed of all his previous character roles.
The ensemble cast of previous generational and new generational actors make the scenes seamlessly bleed into each other like the revolving lobby doors of a New York City skyscraper. But only one actor gets the opening scenes with omniscient powers.
COPPOLA USES A RICH AESTHETIC TO BIND MANY LAYERS
Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a leading urban architect tasked with building the future of the city. Coppola gives Cesar a few additional powers, like those powers of the director with one all knowing eye looking through the camera, while the other all knowing eye simultaneously reviews the story boards.
Cesar doesn’t have a light saber in his hand. Instead, Cesar has a right angle, levelling ruler with a strange glow about it as the lead architect of the Design Authority.
Coppola accents the film with these self referential acting moments while everyone has already, or will eventually become, unhappy about their individual outcomes. The disaffection grows and grows.
Driver has a moment as William Shakespear’s Hamlet with a famous soliloquy acted out verbatim. And then Driver does another soliloquy a bit more contemporaneously, as part of the current on-screen dystopia.
The film becomes at times a bit like those reimagined Shakespearian plays, but it’s not, because of a lot of Hollywood influences and movie magic behind the fantasy, as well as Coppola’ personal infusion of thought processes.
The film’s motif is more influenced by the fantastical realism of fables and what happens to the magic when those fables get told in Hollywood for the big screen blockbusters.
Cesar has an office in the Chrysler Building far above the battles of good versus evil, while the battles of life and death begin to play out in the City of New Rome.
Shakespearian tropes go by, this way and that way.
Shia LeBeouf plays the son of a city oligarch, Clodio, who denies his struggles with gender dysphoria by suggesting that him dressing in a woman’s toga is a fraternity prank. Clodio eventually dresses as gender neutral to challenge Cesar, his cousin, for political control of the future.
Mayor Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, will not lose out to a street brawl, though. Nathalie Emmanuel plays his daughter, Julia, who also happens to be in love with Cesar. Julia must first win over Cesar her way before swaying her father to side with them.
The father-daughter pairing plays out well among the power politics of civilization.
The families controlling the city are slowly losing their interconnectedness and becoming less and less powerful as disenfranchised fragments, while a younger generation waits not so idly by for an opportunity to succeed.
Emmanuel shows how Julia simultaneously knows this and does not know this, but she is ultimately herself swayed by good to overcome the moral vices.
Those players faulter who attempt to succeed by betraying each other, while loyalty to family prevails.
Coppola uses a rich aesthetic to bind many intellectual layers, like the petals of a flower held together with a lot of fragility.
Roman Catholic themes of confession, crucifixion and resurrection make the script turn this way and that. Driver must at one point bring his omniscient character back from the dead as a way of breaking free from the life and death struggle ever present within human civilization.
The storyline is initially difficult to follow until everyone attends the circus as part of a much more elaborate carnival, during which the individual characters become better revealed and their interconnectedness more obvious.
Coppola suggests, with this fable, that humanity must selflessly participate in a time of great individual and civic sacrifice in the hope that humanity may be able to save civilization from itself.
2023
INDIANA JONES
DIAL OF DESTINY
Indiana Jones steps under the spotlight again after decades bouncing around memories in the ever broadening global consciousness.
Director James Mangold folds the secret narrative device of the film into the romantic but illusive and ultimately irrevocably spent time in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), co-starring Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the heroes. Mads Mikkelsen plays the villain.
Mangold blends in a bit of Computer Generated Imaging into the opening scenes to briefly turn back the clock thirty or so years to a time on a train, of all psychotropic devices, with characters streaming forward from the always inescapable past into the ever illusive present.
Computer imaging de-ages Ford in these introductory scenes.
The search for an important piece of archeological treasure again gives way to the more elaborate adventure embarked upon by the protagonist for a much more significant relic imbued with metaphysical importance.
Indiana Jones has this mystical temporal metaphysical transcendence that disrupts time to quite often change the future. Jones is continually brought to a place in time when his life course may be altered in the briefest of moments.
Time is ever after moving backward into history while also moving forward with the chase for eternity being meted out in the city streets.
Jones is about to find himself in the 1960s.
The story of Indiana Jones is again ultimately the story of a victorious underdog. The decidedly American archeologist finds, then loses and ultimately regains possession of the archeological treasures that behold historical significance predating American civilization.
The Archimedes Dial is part fact and part fiction, like American historical revisionism, desperately shaping from real events and the biographies of real people the national destiny of the greatest of empires.
This ruthlessness of capitalism is underscored in the franchise by the competition involved in the private market for antiquities. Historical relics are valuable, yes, but they are also stolen from historical sites, at much cost to past civilizations.
This first joint Disney and Lucasfilm installment of the Indian Jones franchise also keeps within the mold of Americana established by the original creators, George Lucas and filmmaker Steven Spielberg, for the first film in the series released in 1981.
Lucas created the franchise in collaboration with Spielberg. Spielberg directed the first four franchise films, getting for his effort and creative contributions the decision-making powers on the final cut of the theatrical releases.
In Dial of Destiny, Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays Jones’ goddaughter, Helena Shaw, caught in mid-sentence during a private auction of an artifact taken from Jones’ college storeroom.
Helena eventually cedes to a moral compromise and takes on a central role as hero fighting established evil alongside Jones.
Waller-Bridge is cast well with Ford, performing in parallel instead of underwriting or outshining the marque star of the show. Helena has been surviving a while off the grid without a father figure, but the truth of kinship pulls her toward the right path.
Jones identifies the danger of Helena becoming marginalized, and instead of letting her go, he reaches out to her and ultimately recruits her to work for the side of good over evil.
This dynamic ultimately is how the American story has become characterized with actions being taken somehow in the name of good over evil while embarking on risky adventures around the globe that quite often result in a lot of destruction and mayhem. The American underdog seldom obtains the penultimate victory. The protagonist instead resolves a crisis through much destruction, surviving only to having to fight another day.
From the onset, The Dial of Destiny is compelled forward down the timeline with frantic chase scenes that become metaphors for escape and the need to experience freedom, only to discover the futility of the freedom project.
The ‘escaping on a train scene sequence’ has only finite opportunities to experience freedom, forcing Jones and Shaw to jump from the train into the cold running waters. The camera catches up to Jones woken by the sound of the rock and roll music of 1969.
The villain, Ethan Isidore, is a NASA rocket scientist recruited by the Americans from Germany at the end of World War II. Isidore wants to change American history by traveling back in time. Jones and Shaw just want to stop him from doing so.
Indiana Jones too is a bit of trial and error production number, imbuing the many chase scenes with a Chaplinesque tragic comedy quality, while Jones has to periodically pick himself off the ground and dust himself off as a sort of well-meaning underachiever like Chaplin’s character, The Tramp.
The franchise also presents the complicated depth of humanity by exploring existential themes more often with images than words in a type of comic book treatment just short of stripping the characters of everything but their superpowers and singular rationalizations captured in graphic images and dialogue bubbles.
OPPENHEIMER
OPPENHEIMER
Director Christopher Nolan uses the splitting of atoms as a narrative device in this compelling biopic about the nuclear physicist behind the invention of the atomic bomb.
The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico was meant to design a weapon that would bring an abrupt end to the long and gruesome carnage of World War II.
Cillian Murphy provides another laconic performance, this time in the lead role as nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, part of an ensemble cast of talented actors that includes Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr and Jason Clark as special counsel Roger Robb. These established performers are then supported by a number of actors performing the roles of nuclear physicists known and unknown around the world at the time, such as Tom Conti, working with the aid of the hair and make-up department, as Albert Einstein.
Robert Downey Jr has a substantial role in the back story as Lewis Strass, a colleague and admirer of Oppenheimer who incrementally becomes an adversary by 1954.
Hair and make-up have a role throughout the film as the 3 hour runtime ages the characters through several stages in life experienced along the way.
Murphy humanizes Oppenheimer who was well known at the time, literally appearing on the cover of Time Magazine, but whose iconic stature has slipped into the many fissures of historical time since then.
Nolan explores the reasons for this marginalization, as part of the overall vision for the film, in typical Nolan fashion, throwing on layers upon layers of esoteric information presented for a broader audience often with the use of aesthetics.
The score provides significant energy to the narrative throughout the film which allows Nolan to develop the characters and the script with the use of thoughtful dialogue without the film falling flat. Scenes filled with deeper dialogue that might otherwise drop away are pushed forward with the score.
Scenes also oscillate between long scenes and short scenes as well as short scenes interchanging between the main narrative and the back story, sometimes creating uncertainty as to which is which, but overall providing kinetic energy to move the narrative forward. The three hour runtime moves quickly as a result.
The initial scene sequences create a bit of exasperation as the back story about an inquiry into whether Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be renewed drags on a bit until you beg the question just when the director is going to ‘get on with it’ and start telling the story everybody came to the theatre to watch.
MURPHY PROVIDES LACONIC PERFORMANCE FOR ACCOMPLISHED FILMMAKER CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
Murphy humanizes the famous physicist as much as he can by having a passion for love and family as Americans were encouraged to do in the 1940s and 1950s. But Oppenheimer is motivated by physics and nuclear science as much if not more than Kitty and his two children.
Similarly to Inception (2010) in which Nolan explores dreams and time within dreams, the aesthetics used in depicting transcendental realities becomes one of several elements that complement the characters on their journeys along the narrative line.
Nolan also keeps the camera moving, and as a result, like the atom being split, the narrative becomes a series of unique compositions, with nearly every scene being different with an ever changing tone and atmosphere to the overall film project.
All of this great imagination being crystalized in story boards and then film footage, is edited well together under the supervision of a clearly master filmmaker infusing all his experience and dedication to the art of cinema in telling the story of the biopic character. Americana never looked so good in this capture by the meticulous camera hand, and objective eye of a non-American filmmaker with an international cast of actors.
Murphy captures the leading American physicist in his fanaticism about science, space and the matter of substances. Oppenheimer, like many scientists, believed that science not humanism could end global conflict only to discover the achievements in science can be used just as quickly for evil as for good.
Emily Blunt puts on a character specific mask to her design of an assertive, independent female protagonist that self-medicates the emotional difficulties encountered in life with alcohol.
Kitty has the botanist’s clinical ability to assess situations. But both Kitty and Robert love and want to live with love and children and find a way to make family life work in and around their scientific obsessions.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
DEAD RECKONING
Just when the preliminary action sequences seem to be taking too long and are becoming too obscure to lead to an eventual main narrative, the fuse is lit, and the film score bounces the opening credits about a bit.
This image montage hints of a grand spy action thriller that will unfold very quickly, although at times a bit too precariously for film set safety reasons over 2 hours and 43 minutes.
Director Christopher McQuarrie perfects his filmmaking with the stylized action sequences created for his third entry in the seven film Mission: Impossible franchise.
Dead Reckoning (2023) moves fast with an action scene sequence filmed in one historical location to the next until the narrative traps the audience in a vested relationship with the film characters.
The score, composed by Lorne Balfe, drives the scene sequences overtop of the kinetic energy created as the camera, as the franchise tends to do, captures a lot of killing of enemy operatives with the use of a lot of automatic firing weapons.
Initially, the air condition room of a government spy agency gives way to the icy underwater submarine world of the artic waters off the coast of northern Europe, only to quickly fall away to the dry heat of a windstorm in the Arabian desert. These environments quickly become lethal for the many extras involved in the film production.
The contrast of deep freeze and melting heat begins to grate a bit as McQuarrie pulls the audience further into the film. These first attempts by the filmmaker create expectations for future scenes that provoke an emotive response, such as the background sound effects and the score are suddenly turned off for a stunt jump that makes you feel a bit like you have been taken along on the jump.
Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt, team leader of the deep cover spy agency, Impossible Mission Force.
This Tom Cruise production also recasts recurring team members, Ving Rames as Luther Stickell, and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn. Disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson also returns in a familiar role as a vicarious overwatch for Ethan Hunt.
Vanessa Kirby returns as well as international arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, daughter of Max from Mission: Impossible I (1996).
The plot involves the IMF team searching for a cruciform key that apparently unlocks an Artificial Intelligence weapon developed to have a conscience with precognition.
Hunt, as he tends to do, merely wants to keep the weapon of military signifance from being used by any number of villains around the globe that may or may not soon be joining them in the chase to find it.
The weapon has been activated to become the Entity, a kind of on-line phantom.
McQuarrie emphasis technology and artificial intelligence throughout the film while giving most frames a modern finish even when filming the chase scenes on the cobblestone roads in Rome.
The charm of having old and new together is brought out with references to the high tech of special operations such as the automatic machine guns and the Osprey helicopters in the desert sandstorm as well as the power of military vehicles customized for civilian use in the streets surrounding the Colosseum.
The AVX sound system distinguishes the sliding tires of the vehicles on the cobblestones from the maddening score overtop the endless chase.
Hayley Atwell costars with Cruise, as the up and coming international thief, Grace, is turned by Hunt to work for a greater global cause.
Atwell and Cruise are cast well together with a bit of mentorship happening between the characters that adds to the spy versus spy dynamic involving a few tropes, such as ‘you can never trust a thief’. Grace and Hunt cannot really trust each other, at least Grace cannot trust Hunt to let her get away with anything, and Hunt cannot quite trust Grace to stop working for herself and start working for the team.
The camera work lends slightly more to aesthetics than previous franchise films. This stylized directing is aided by the urban architectural aesthetics of the location shoots such as an awesome fight scene in a gated single lane walkway in stark contrast to the overhead camera shots of the car chase on a cobblestone piazza.
Sound advances add even more momentum to the narrative while the sound of foot traffic and car chases gives way eventually to an extraordinary runaway train action sequence.
What is noticeable is that the Computer Generated Imaging is not noticeable partly because the technology is used very sparingly. CGI is used for many of the stunts, but the stunts are themselves filmed on location, as opposed to filming the entire stunt in a studio in front of a blue/green or ‘purple’ screen with the locations added later in the computer graphic room.
Cruise has also often tried to instill a bit of humor in the scripts, and that infusion of drama and tragic comedy is more successful this time out.
One of the movie trailers shows Hunt and Grace handcuffed together in a yellow Fiat 500. This sequence is actually a much extended version in the film with the two in flight from the villains clawing everyone’s memories back to those first attempts at bumper cars at the amusement park midway.
McQuarrie has brought together an ensemble cast with several new additions, such as Shea Whigham with his sardonic humor bordering on parody of the largely unsuccessful law enforcement official in hot pursuit.
