Last Chance: Anna Karenina, Lost in Translation, Shivers, and Big Trouble

Public Service Announcement for Happy Streaming! The following list of movies are available on streaming only until the end of this month. This is not, alas, a comprehensive list (good luck with that -- even the official press releases and specialty "what's leaving" sites are never entirely comprehensive / accurate). But here are 10 titles + that caught our eye and they'll be gone when May strolls in. Now's the time if you have any desire to watch them. To help whet your appetite or kill it, depending, here is our playful yet highly unscientific practice of freezing the movies entirely at random to see what image/quote comes up. Please to discuss the titles.

Ahhh, taxation without representation, brother. Nothing's free in this world you lucky first day motherfucker."

Training Day (2001) Netflix
"I love my life," it's Denzel's second Oscar. 

Travolta, Newman, Witherspoon, and Jodie Foster after the jump...

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"Time 100" is Oscar-Obsessed

Magazines may be a dying business but the few mega magazines that remain all have annual traditions to entice buys. And so it is with the "Time 100" an annual list of "Most Influential" though as with any such list it's highly subjective.

Here is a list of the movie & television people who made it this year in one of their five sections (the only section that does not include at least one actor is "Leaders")

Pioneers Aziz Ansari and Gina Rodriguez

Titans Dwayne Johnson, Wang Jianlin, and Kathleen Kennedy 

Taraji is the modern-day Bette Davis, touching audiences with her honesty and intensity. When you are on set with Taraji, she listens, but she also questions. She challenges everyone to go the extra step to get it right. She has a deep understanding of the human condition, and she displays it with her eyes—the pain, the happiness, the love, the laughter. She probably would have been a great silent actor, but then the world wouldn’t have had Cookie.

Before Empire, she was underappreciated by white America and Hollywood, while African Americans heralded her as our Meryl Streep. I’m so proud that Cookie has moved her into the zeitgeist. What Taraji has done with the role made the world finally appreciate who she is—quite simply, a tour de force on and off the screen.
-Lee Daniels on Taraji P Henson 

I offered Mark Rylance a significant supporting role in 1987 in my film Empire of the Sun—and he turned it down. A play had caught his fancy, and anyway, I sensed he was suspicious about film acting. Who could blame him? For actors who have given their lives to theater, making movies must be like lurching in the backseat of a car while the driver keeps working the brake. When Mark does a play, nobody says, “Cut,” only “Curtain” after a few uninterrupted hours. Legions of young thespians look to Mark as their muse and inspiration. From Boeing-Boeing to Jerusalem to Twelfth Night, the impact he’s had on classical and contemporary theater is the stuff of legend. A winner of three Tony Awards, two Olivier Awards and now an Oscar, Mark glimpses these honors with gratitude and humility, but his heart belongs to a good story. His soul is pure. He just loves to act.
-Steven Spielberg on Mark Rylance 

Artists Gael García Bernal, Taraji P Henson, Melissa McCarthy, Ryan Coogler, Idris Elba, Oscar Isaac, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mark Rylance, Charlize Theron, and Priyanka Chopra 

Icons They went full Revenant here honoring both Leonardo DiCaprio & Alejandro González Iñárritu

What's the takeaway?
It always amuses us when people call the Oscars "irrelevant" since the very fact that people get so up in arms about them every year is quite the indication that they remain the most relevant of movie institutions (even if movies themselves aren't as central to pop culture as they once were). They matter to people. Even the act of rising up against The Academy is underlining their stature as the house of the definitive golden idol of Hollywood. Time's movie lists are extremely unsubtle about sticking it to the Academy yet again over #OscarsSoWhite. Note that they ignored all but three Oscar nominees (the three big male winners) while honoring both Ryan Coogler & Idris Elba. Not that Coogler and Elba aren't worth honoring as they did have great years! But if they weren't trying to shame the Academy yet again they might well have considered Cheryl Boone Isaacs for this list since she's in the media so much of late and has been trying so hard to make a difference on the issue of diversity in Tinseltown. On the other hand, even as Time slaps Oscar's hand, they're embracing its other status quo #OscarsSoMale (in a manly back-patting kind of way) since they included all three of the Academy's most high-profile male winners (Rylance, DiCaprio, and Iñárritu) and neither of the big female winners.

Do you think of all these people as influential? Whose part do you suppose Spielberg wanted Rylance to play in Empire of the Sun? 

Review: Tale of Tales

Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is based on the writings of 16th century author Giambattista Basile, who by most accounts compiled the first collection of fairy tales as we came to know them. If you think that the Brothers Grimm’s non-Disney-fied stories are dark, wait till you get a hold of Basile’s perverse accounts of doomed princesses, kings that set their wives on fire, and men who stab the women who they think betrayed them. More than stories about “fairies” and “happily ever after”, they’re cautionary tales about how unfair the world has always been for women who defy men. One wonders though, why would Garrone make a lavish, epic film about such injustices, without any sense of intention behind why he’s telling them.

The film essentially follows the misadventures of the members of three royal families. The first takes place in the kingdom of Darkwood where a capricious Queen (Salma Hayek) sends her King (John C. Reilly) to his death in order to fulfill the command of a necromancer who has advised him to procure the heart of a sea monster which the Queen must devour in order to have a child. The second family is ruled by the King of the Highhills (Toby Jones) who promises his daughter’s (Bebe Cave) hand in marriage to whoever guesses a riddle. An ogre (Guillaume Delaunay) does, and he’s not the kind of lovable ogre who grows a heart, but a ruthless monster who keeps the princess inside a cave in the mountains. The third tale has a lustful King (Vincent Cassel) “fall in love” with the voice of a woman he has never seen, but whom he must possess. To say that this leads to no good would be an understatement.

After his expertly made Gomorrah, which also saw him intertwine various Neapolitan tales, it’s clear that Garrone has the skills required to engage the viewer in the world he conveys, but one often wants to escape the world he’s crafted in Tale of Tales much more than the one of vicious mobsters in Gomorrah. Where the latter was brutal, its effectiveness in portraying the senselessness of criminal life is unrivaled at least in contemporary cinema. But the way we see the women in Tale of Tales be punished for their desires - whether sexual, filial or maternal - is absolutely merciless. If Garrone was trying to show how little the world has changed in its treatment of women since the 16th century, to do so in the guise of “old fashioned” entertainment seems counterproductive. The film is so keen in its desire to entertain and delight, that it loses sight of the content of the stories to the point that it makes Disney seem progressive. At least in those films a fairy godmother shows up to save the day.

Tale of Tales is now in theaters.

Every Dog Has Its Day: Iñárritu, 16 Years and 2 Directing Oscars Later

Eric here to discuss cinema’s currently-most-celebrated director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. As Nathaniel has noted previously, all six of Inarritu’s feature films have gotten Oscar attention in one way or another, and of course much has been written about his being the first filmmaker since 1950 to win the Best Director Oscar two years in a row. He's also just been named to the Time 100 "Icons" List.  So there’s no better time than to look back to Inarritu’s first feature, 2000’s Amores Perros, to see where he started and where he’s landed.  

Watching Amores Perros (2000) for the first time since its initial release, I was struck by how even at the start of his career, Inarritu picked extraordinarily difficult environments to shoot in.  The logistics for Amores Perros can’t have practically been much easier than the ones we are all sick of hearing about with The Revenant.  His debut feature has him shooting all over Mexico City (inarguably one of the world’s most chaotic cities), with a colossally large group of actors, and constructing a large-scale and crucially precise car wreck sequence that pays off to all three of the film’s narratives in different ways.  Plus throw in a lot of very difficult (and legally tricky) scenes with huge groups of dogs fighting, bleeding, and getting shot.  Inarritu’s self-masochism was alive and well from the very start. [More...]

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