by Jason Adams
It's a big day for Netflix's 2019 Oscar slate, with Martin Scorsese's The Irishman opening in eight theaters in New York (one of them being the famed Broadway theater the Belasco) and Los Angeles -- you can read my thoughts on the movie when it screened at NYFF right here. It's a great film, worthy of all the praise it's gotten and will continue to get. That Marty guy can direct a movie!
But if you're not near those eight theaters (or if you are, even) there's another choice from the streaming giant that I recommend you get your eyeballs on -- David Michôd's The King starring Timothee Chalamet has now hit their online service after its own brief theatrical window, and I suggest you find the biggest screen you can find for it...
It is breathtakingly gorgeous to look upon, and I don't just mean Timmy's bowl-cut. (I reviewed it here.)
I don't know if at this point the buzz on The King is loud enough to elbow any of the noisier contenders out of the way which is a shame, because Chalamet somehow delivers a rousing battlefield speech that I was actually genuinely roused by, no easy feat that. But if anything deserves to aggressively elbow its way into the chatter, and I'll do my damndest to throw elbows for, its the cinematography from Adam Arkapaw, who's worked with Michod several times now. Those war-torn oranges that his Macbeth seared into your brain two years before Blade Runner 2049 ripped him off? Yeah that was him. (Sorry Roger Deakins -- I still love you.)
With The King the palette's more muted -- picture a Rembrandt and then picture it come to life like we're inside the world of Harry Potter and that's what staring at The King felt like to me. Arkapaw's play with light and shadow is truly spectacular -- you can not just feel the dust hanging in the air, you can almost feel it falling onto the fabric of the clothes, the brush of those elaborate furs against skin, the hard dark knots in the wooded panels. This distant world feels immediate and tangible; even weeks later I can sense its contours when I close my eyes. That's not nothing!