TBD | A disgraced detective returns to the big city to solve a series of murders. Directed by John Lee Hancock Starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto Review by Jon Kissel |
Denzel Washington is such a great actor that the Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period podcast could credibly exist for years. I listened to almost every episode and the hosts never allowed for the possibility that there was an alternative to their podcast title. However, Washington hasn’t been in a great movie since the mid-2000’s depending on if one is an American Gangster, Man on Fire, or Inside Man partisan, and the greatest director he’s worked with in the last fifteen years is probably himself. He’s gone down the old-man action path far more than the prestige path. Washington’s an actor of instant name recognition who can seemingly do whatever he wants and he wants to remake the Magnificent Seven. His latest, The Little Things, is another odd choice. I doubt Washington wanted to fulfill a career goal by working with the director of The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock. The Little Things’ triple-Oscar winner main cast does nothing to elevate a script that offers essentially nothing to the serial killer genre, including Washington who’s in paycheck mode. Add the lackluster presence of Rami Malek and the terminally off-putting Jared Leto, and this is a film whose existence is completely unnecessary.
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One of the more noteworthy films of 2020, if only for the various dunks upon it from film Twitter, was Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy, a clear Oscar pitch starring two high-profile actors deglamorizing themselves in service to a rough story of semi-relevance. The reviews kept Hillbilly Elegy off my radar, but I have read the book it’s based on, and I think it’s a perfectly fine memoir that has little to say beyond its personal detail. A film that takes place decades earlier but in the same region of Appalachia is The Devil All the Time, adapted from a collection of short stories by author Donald Ray Pollock, a native of the region who didn’t officially put pen to paper until he was in his 50’s. Pollock’s writings have been adapted for the screen by Antonio Campos, a director of visceral feel-bad movies like Afterschool and Christine and a person well-suited for Pollock’s dark vision of backwoods misery and manipulation. Despite their bona fide roots, neither Campos’ film nor Hillbilly Elegy, if it’s anything like the book that is, provide much of a perceptive window onto the region, and in the case of The Devil All the Time, the miserabilism becomes predictable and meaningless. This pales in comparison to someone like Jeff Nichols, a director who cares about his setting and his characters in a way Campos is unable to here.
Uncut Gems was one of the more important and notable movies from 2019, and I would usually write an appropriately lengthy review in correlation with all the professional ink that was spilled on it, but I am unfamiliar with the autosave feature on the latest version of MS Office and the 1000+ words I wrote earlier this evening somehow disappeared. I’m too irritated to recreate that review, so this is going to be shorter than usual. That kind of mishap, however, seems appropriate for Uncut Gems, a comedy of errors where things keep going wrong for its nigh-intolerable protagonist, diamond district denizen Howard Ratner. Played by Adam Sandler in one of his groundhog-esque displays of acting ability, poking his head up out of the David Spade/Kevin James dirt to remind everyone of his talent, Howard tests the limits of my empathy. Saddled with a compulsive illness that he would characterize as ‘how he wins,’ Howard is so reckless and dangerous that he devalues every character in the film that chooses to spend time with or around him. Anyone who doesn’t run screaming from this guy is an abysmal judge of character.
For the cast of Dark Places, 2015 was a high water mark for several of their careers. Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult co-starred in perhaps the greatest action film ever made in Mad Max: Fury Road. Christina Hendricks was ending her run as Joan in the final season of Mad Men. Sean Bridgers, best known as Johnny Burns from Deadwood, co-starred in the best film on his resume in Room, though he memorably played an unconscionable dirtbag in it. Add in acclaimed young actors like Tye Sheridan and Chloe Moretz, plus the source material from Gillian Flynn one year after Gone Girl’s film adaptation and the pedigree of indie darling studio A24, and Dark Places should have been an easy layup for all involved. Instead, the leaden direction and writing from Gilles Paquet-Brenner takes these ingredients and turns them into one of those gray blobs from the Breath of the Wild game. One should never mix the prime steak of this cast with the assorted bag of monster parts that is Paquet-Brenner.
Americans get worked up over strange things. Back before the days when the president demanded every ounce of attention and the media was happy to give it to him, we’ve lost our collective shit over Harambe and Cecil, Casey Anthony and Jon-Benet Ramsey. David Fincher remembers being a kid during a period of war and social unrest that makes today look quaint, and his California community choosing to go a little bit nuts over an early serial killer who attempted to kill seven people and was tragically successful for five of them. The Zodiac killer sucks up some amount of air during his active period, but for most, it fades and becomes a thing that happens, fodder for an opening paragraph in an amateur movie review and not much more. For others, this becomes a defining event in their lives for reasons they can’t explain and those meticulous, obsessive individuals, not unlike Fincher himself, are the people he chooses to follow in Zodiac, an epic-length investigation of a mostly meaningless event that’s only grown more relevant with the explosion of true-crime material in the 13 years since its release. |
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