"People want a monster that they can fear." We're just about to enter October, which means it's the month of horror leading up to Halloween! RLJE Films has debuted an official trailer for the indie horror thriller titled Trick, the latest from writer / director duo Todd Farmer & Patrick Lussier (both of Drive Angry and My Bloody Valentine). Trick is the latest Halloween night horror, this one also involving a massacre from the past that comes to haunt people again. Omar Epps plays a no-nonsense detective trying to track down the serial killer named "Trick" who is terrorizing a small town. Also starring Ellen Adair, Kristina Reyes, Jamie Kennedy, Vanessa Aspillaga, and Tom Atkins. The main pumpkin mask seems to be inspired a bit by Dougherty's Trick 'r Treat, though this movie looks way more brutal and intensely violent. Watch out.
Here's the first official trailer for Patrick Lussier's Trick, from RLJE's YouTube (via Bloody Disgusting):
On Halloween night in 2015, Patrick "Trick" Weaver massacred his classmates at a costume party. After being arrested, he managed to escape police custody, but not before being shot five times by Detective Mike Denver. Everyone believes Trick must be dead, but when a masked killer reappears the following Halloween, and every Halloween after that, they realize the nightmare is not over. With Trick wreaking havoc and killing people in increasingly terrifying ways, Denver will stop at nothing to bring the carnage to an end.Trick is directed by Canadian-American editor / filmmaker Patrick Lussier, director of the films Dracula 2000, White Noise 2: The Light, My Bloody Valentine, and Drive Angry. The screenplay is by Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier (both of Drive Angry and My Bloody Valentine). Produced by Ita Kennedy and Ellen S. Wander. This hasn't premiered at any film festivals or elsewhere, as far as we know. RLJE will release Lussier's Trick in select theaters + on VOD starting October 18th coming up soon. Anyone scared?
"When you're ill, you realize that health is everything. If you're in good health, there is no limit." Cohen Media Group has released the first official trailer for a documentary titled Serendipity, not to be confused with that John Cusack film from 2001. Serendipity is an autobiographical film made by, and about, French artist Prune Nourry. She has spent a majority of her artistic career creating work that deals with women's bodies and female fertility. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, she decided to create this film (also a book) which captures the subsequent evolution of her body, her work, her soul, her mind. This beautiful film embodies the artist's belief that everything is connected, coincidence is an illusion, and "the essentials to life really are health, love, and art." It is a very unique, deeply introspective doc that is worth a bit of your time.
Here's the official trailer (+ new poster) for Prune Nourry's doc Serendipity, direct from CMG's YouTube:
Multi-disciplinary French artist Prune Nourry has gained international recognition for her thought-provoking, educational, and often times humorous projects exploring bioethics through sculpture as well as video, photography, and performance. At the young age of 31, Prune is diagnosed with breast cancer. She starts documenting her treatment and its effect on her own body, turning her medical odyssey into an epic artistic adventure as she discovers new meaning in her impressive body of work and its serendipitous relationship to her own survival.Serendipity is directed by French artist / filmmaker / sculptor Prune Nourry, making her feature directorial debut with this, after making other short videos previously. This first premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. Cohen Media will release Nourry's Serendipity in select US theaters starting on October 18th in a few weeks. For more updates visit Prune's official website.
"I am a strong, empowered monster." Don't miss this funky, fantastic short film Martha the Monster, from writer / director Christopher Weekes. In an upside-down reality where humans live with monsters, Martha, a 20-something furry, must learn to hold her own in a modern metropolitan city. It features full-size puppet characters, similar to those in Where the Wild Things Are. "I was massively inspired by the work of Spike Jonze, and was really drawn to the idea of a fun, colourful way of exploring what it’s like to blend in within a big city when you’re so obviously built to stand out," Weekes explains. "Blending a mix of facial capture with traditional puppet techniques… a little of the old, a little of the new." This stars Rose Byrne, Bobby Cannavale, Kailah Cabanas, Nicholas Brown, and Krew Boylan. Another must watch short.
Thanks to Short of the Week for the tip on this one. Description from Vimeo: "In a world where humans live alongside monsters, Martha finds herself stuck with a major identity crisis." Martha the Monster is written & directed by VFX industry veteran-turned-filmmaker Christopher Weekes. He also directed the short George Lucas & I back in 2001. A See Pictures Production, in assoc. with Goodman Brothers Productions & Casp Productions. Produced with the support of Screen Australia and Magenius. Featuring cinematography by Lachlan Milne; with an original score by Michael Yezerski; and visual effects by Elliot Goodman. Weekes states that he "really wanted to use this film to give life to monster suits in a way we haven't seen on screen before." For more info, visit the See Pictures website or SOTW. For more shorts, click here. Your thoughts?
"There is no better way to tell this story than with one continuous shot." Ohhhhh hell yes! Another one-shot movie coming up this year. Universal has debuted a fascinating behind-the-scenes featurette for Sam Mendes' new film 1917, set during World War I in the year 1917 - watch the first teaser trailer again. The war movie takes place over the course of one day, following soldiers on a "seemingly impossible mission" to deliver a message across enemy lines to stop an attack that will kill their own soldiers. With cinematography by Roger Deakins, of course. The excellent ensemble cast features: Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, George MacKay, Teresa Mahoney, Dean-Charles Chapman, Daniel Mays, Adrian Scarborough, Justin Edwards, Gerran Howell, Anson Boon, and Richard McCabe. I love that they release these featurettes now, instead of saving them only for Blu-ray special features, because this looks magnificent. So much movie-making magic being shown! Wow.
Here's the official behind-the-scenes featurette for Sam Mendes' 1917, direct from Universal's YouTube:
You can still watch the first teaser trailer for Sam Mendes' 1917here, to see the intense first reveal again.
At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will put a stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers – Blake's own brother among them.1917 is directed by Oscar-winning English filmmaker Sam Mendes, director of the films American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, Away We Go, plus James Bond's Skyfall and Spectre previously. The screenplay is written by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns. Produced by Pippa Harris, Callum McDougall, Sam Mendes, and Jayne-Ann Tenggren; co-produced by Michael Lerman. Amblin + Universal Pictures will open Sam Mendes' 1917 movie in theaters everywhere starting December 25th, on Christmas Day, at the end of this year. Planning to go watch this in theaters?
"They found no skeletons [in the closet], only beautiful shoes." Showtime has debuted the official trailer for The Kingmaker, the latest acclaimed documentary made by filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth). This just premiered at the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals a month ago, and it's also playing at the Toronto, Bergen, London, and Chicago Film Festivals before it opens in a few select US theaters in November. Focused on the indomitable character of Imelda Marcos, The Kingmaker examines, with intimate access, the Marcos family's improbable return to power in the Philippines. Marcos is the extremely wealthy former first lady of the Philippines whose tricky behind-the-scenes influence of her husband Ferdinand's presidency rocketed her to the global political stage. It's a look at how her corruption and ruthlessness are still prevalent, and it's a riveting, eye-opening, frightful doc about the times we live in.
Here's the first official trailer (+ poster) for Lauren Greenfield's doc The Kingmaker, from YouTube:
Centered on the indomitable character of Imelda Marcos, The Kingmaker examines with intimate access the Marcos family's improbable return to power in the Philippines. The film explores the disturbing legacy of the Marcos regime and chronicles Imelda's present-day push to help her son, Bongbong, win the vice-presidency. To this end, Imelda confidently rewrites her family's history of corruption, replacing it with a narrative of a matriarch's extravagant love for her own country. In an age when fake news manipulates elections, the Marcos family's comeback story serves as a dark fairy tale.The Kingmaker is directed by American photographer / doc filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, director of the doc films Thin, The Queen of Versailles, and Generation Wealth previously, as well as numerous shorts. This premiered at the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals this year, and will also play at the Chicago Film Festival coming up. Showtime will debut Greenfield's The Kingmaker in select US theaters starting November 8th this fall. Who's interested?
When you look at the top 10 best openings for animated features, only six of them are Disney movies. That’s still a majority, but not as much as you’d expect these days. The other four are either DreamWorks Animation or Illumination, both of which are now subsidiaries of Universal Pictures. Two are Shrek sequels from a time when DWA was not part of Universal, one of them is the spinoff Minions, and finally, there’s the surprise 2017 blockbuster The Secret Life of Pets. Expand to the top 20, and we’ve got another Shrek sequel, another sequel featuring the Minions (Despicable Me 2), plus two from Fox animation — an Ice Age sequel and The Simpsons Movie, both of which are now part of the Disney library.
Clearly, Disney is dominating the animation game, and that’s not a shocker. They began as a studio based in animation and gave us the first animated feature 80 years ago. But at a time when they’re also ruling the live-action arena, it’d be nice to see other animation studios competing a little better. There have been periods when Disney wasn’t the biggest name in animation. In the 1980s you had The Care Bears Movie beating Disney’s The Black Cauldron and An American Tail topping The Great Mouse Detective in their respective years. And when DWA arrived on the scene in 1998, the studio proved to be a big player pretty quickly. Their Shrek franchise had the top-selling animated feature domestically in 2000, 2004, and 2007. And even the comparatively disappointing Shrek Forever After was among the top 10 movies of 2010.
Shrek wasn’t the only property giving Disney a run for its money, either. DWA’s Madagascar was the top-selling animated feature of 2005. And other studios made a showing, as well, with Fox’s Ice Age leading the pack in 2002. In the last 11 years, Disney has mostly been on top, though the studio gave up its crown in 2014 (to The LEGO Movie) and 2017 (to Despicable Me 3). And most of the decade has seen non-Disney animated features joining the Mouse House in their year’s top 10s. Especially where global box office attendance is concerned — Disney was defeated by other animation studios worldwide in 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2017. That won’t happen this year, which thanks to Toy Story and Frozen sequels plus the “live-action-style” but still totally animated The Lion King remake will see Disney dominate stronger than ever.
Here are the top 5 animated features by domestic attendance, 2009-2018:
2009:Up (Disney, 39.3M), Monsters Vs. Aliens (DWA, 26.6M), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Fox, 26.3M), A Christmas Carol (Disney, 18.1M), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Sony, 16.5M)
Non-Disney share: 55 percent
2010:Toy Story 3 (Disney, 53.3M), Despicable Me (Universal, 32.6M), Shrek Forever After (DWA, 30.3M), How to Train Your Dragon (DWA, 27.6M), Tangled (Disney, 25.2M)
Non-Disney share: 54 percent
2011:Cars 2 (Disney, 23.9M), Kung Fu Panda 2 (DWA, 20.5M), Puss in Boots (19.1M), Rio (Fox, 17.8M), Rango (Paramount, 15.7M)
Non-Disney share: 75 percent
2012:Brave (Disney, 30M), Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (Universal, 26.9M), Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (DWA, 26.9M), Wreck-It Ralph (Disney, 23.6M), Ice Age: Continental Drift (Fox, 20.7M)
Non-Disney share: 58 percent
2013:Frozen (Disney, 49M), Despicable Me 2 (Universal, 46.9M), Monsters University (Disney, 33.2M), The Croods (Fox, 22.8M), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (Sony, 14.4M)
Non-Disney share: 51 percent
2014:The LEGO Movie (Warner Bros., 32.3M), Big Hero 6 (Disney, 26.9M), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (DWA, 21.5M), Rio 2 (Fox, 15.8M), Mr. Peabody & Sherman (Fox, 13.9M)
Disney share: 76 percent
2015:Inside Out (Disney, 42.5M), Minions (Universal, 40.7M), Home (DWA, 20.6M), Hotel Transylvania 2 (Sony, 19.5M), The Peanuts Movie (Fox, 15M)
Non-Disney share: 69 percent
2016:Finding Dory (Disney, 56.2M), The Secret Life of Pets (Universal, 43.3M), Zootopia (Disney, 39.6M), Sing (Universal, 30.7M), Moana (Disney, 28.3M)
Non-Disney share: 57 percent
2017:Despicable Me 3 (Universal, 29.6M), Coco (Disney, 22.9M), The LEGO Batman Movie (WB, 19.9M), The Boss Baby (DWA, 19.6M), Cars 3 (Disney, 17.1M)
Non-Disney share: 63 percent
2018:Incredibles 2 (66.3M), Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (Universal, 30M), Ralph Breaks the Internet (Disney, 22.3M), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Sony, 21.1M), Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (Sony, 19M)
Non-Disney share: 44 percent
At the moment, there is a showing for non-Disney animation in 2019 with the sequels How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and The Secret Life of Pets 2, but both those and The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part have all grossed small fractions of what their predecessors did (36-percent, 59-percent, and 64-percent drops from their originals, respectively). Their share of the domestic animation ticket sales is at the moment just 25 percent! And that’s before the release of Frozen 2, which assuming it’s somehow not a bust will join the other Disney features in the top three for the format this year. Nothing else from another studio — despite appealing-enough non-sequel contenders The Addams Family, Playmobil: The Movie, and Spies in Disguise — is likely to make a showing in the top five for 2019. If a decent DWA film like Abominable can’t bring all the kids to the theater in its opening weekend, then what non-Disney movie can?
Sure, Abominable looks like a hit. But while it came in first place in its debut (and garnered Univeral its 13th weekend-topper versus Disney’s 11), it gave the DWA their worst opening of all time for a computer-animated feature. And second-worst of all their titles. The yeti-focused film sold only 2.3 million tickets in North America, which is only better than Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas‘ 1.1 million back in 2003. The previous worst debut for a computer-animated DWA production was Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, which drew a much bigger crowd of 8.3 million in its opening weekend. Maybe it’s because Abominable was the third animated movie involving a bigfoot/sasquatch/yeti in the last 12 months. Maybe it’s because there’s so much alternative animated fare available at home. Maybe at a time when non-Disney sequels are underperforming, a non-Disney original is just never going to be a safe bet.
The hope is that Abominable will do well enough in China (where it’s set) to recoup its production cost. As for the future of domestic releases, 2020 brings two original Pixar animated features for Disney, and it’s hard to guess how well they’ll do (Onward is possibly going to be a rare Pixar dud going by trailer reactions so far, but Soul should be the next Inside Out), plus a fantastic-looking non-Pixar Disney picture (Raya and the Last Dragon). Then there are the non-Disney sequels Minions: The Rise of Gru, which ought to be huge, and Trolls World Tour, which I expect to be a surprise box office disappointment given that kids have tons of Trolls content at home with the first movie and seven-season-strong animated series. There will be a lot of other options, too (Scooby and Bob’s Burgers, included) but not much that will challenge the Disney machine.
In other box office news, Takashi Miike had the best per-screen average with his new movie First Love, which was only showing in two theaters in its debut weekend. Judy was next with its limited-release opening, placing seventh on the box office chart despite being in fewer than 500 locations. And in 18th place, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice was once again the top-selling documentary of the weekend, with the film passing the $2 million mark for its domestic gross. Downton Abbey proved to be mostly frontloaded with fans of the TV series going to see it last weekend and far fewer stragglers showing up this time, while Hustlers, on the other hand, is displaying some excellent legs as it actually rose back up the chart to number three. Of course, Joker is out on Friday and will crush everything in its path.
Here are the weekend’s top 12 domestic release titles by the estimated number of tickets sold with new and newly wide titles in bold and totals in parentheses:
1. Abominable – 2.3 million (2.3 million)
2. Downton Abbey – 1.6 million (6.5 million)
3. Hustlers – 1.3 million (8.9 million)
4. IT: Chapter Two – 1.2 million (21.5 million)
5. Ad Astra – 1.1 million (3.9 million)
6. Rambo: Last Blood – 1 million (3.7 million) 7. Judy– 0.3 million (0.3 million)
8. Good Boys– 0.22 million (8.9 million)
9. The Lion King – 0.18 million (59.9 million)
10. Angel Has Fallen – 0.17 million (7.5 million)
11. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw – 0.13 million (19.1 million)
12. The Peanut Butter Falcon – 0.1 million (2 million)
"Sensational." Netflix has unveiled a full-length, official US trailer for the outstanding French animated film I Lost My Body, also known as J'ai perdu mon corps. That French title translates directly to I Lost My Body, though it has also gone under the simpler title of just Grab. A cut-off hand escapes from a dissection lab with one goal: to get back to its body. As it scrambles through the pitfalls of Paris, it remembers its life with the man it was once attached to… until they met Gabrielle. The film had trouble getting financing, and it took over two years to develop and create, eventually produced at the animation studio Xilam. I saw this in Cannes and totally flipped for it, I love everything about it. My review is quoted in the trailer as well - it definitely is "one of the most imaginative, ambitious films of the year." The film stars the voices of Hakim Faris, Victoire Du Bois, and Patrick d'Assumçao. And the beautiful score is by Dan Levy. See below.
After the death of Ingmar Bergman, Kent Jones wrote that few directors had their greatness so misunderstood and simplified by supporters and admirers. Although it may be especially true of Bergman, this phenomenon is at least partially true for almost any beloved director. Steven Spielberg’s war films and thrillers have been overshadowed by his fantasies and sci-fi films; Francis Ford Coppola has been unfairly painted as a director with a mere eight years of quality output; and Martin Scorsese’s reputation as a director of mob and crime films belies his Catholic spiritualism (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Silence), his comedic side (After Hours, The King of Comedy, The Wolf of Wall Street) and his historical interests (The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Hugo). It’s the spiritualism that is easiest to overlook, however; unlike Abel Ferrara, his fellow New York-based chronicler of the underworld, Scorsese has tended to keep his Catholic guilt and his fascination with man’s proclivity toward violence separate, meaning that critical appreciation of the latter has subjugated the former to a footnote.
That is, he has kept them separate until now. Goodfellas and Casino relate the lives of men eventually done in by their own greed, while with The Wolf of Wall Street Scorsese reconsidered his own crime films by expanding the purview of the amoral, the entitled, and the criminal to reveal those who get off scot-free for their wrongdoing. The Irishman turns the coin around, highlighting the moral consciousness (or lack thereof) of his subjects. It is a film not about what mobsters do, but the relationships they forge and destroy, and it is pervaded by a sense of mortality and questions of legacy. If it falls short of his best work, it nevertheless forces us to reconsider a body of work that is far more expansive than it is often given credit for by changing the template of his previous mob films and foregrounding questions of aging both in its text and its production.
The Irishman is based on Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses, a biography of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran focusing on his connections to Jimmy Hoffa and the Bufalino crime family. Its accuracy has been disputed, but Scorsese is less interested in Sheeran’s life for its own sake than in his remorselessness for his crimes in the face of death, and he sees Sheeran as a man subject to history rather than a creator of it. What Scorsese’s most acclaimed films tend to share is a plunge into their protagonists’ state of mind, often via voiceover. The Irishman retains the voiceover, but is nevertheless marked by ironic distance. It is told almost entirely through Sheeran’s flashbacks, and characters are introduced with captions informing the audience of the gruesome ways in which they are killed. Political history is never far from the film, but the events (the election and assassination of JFK, as well as the Bay of Pigs) are always known in advance to viewers. We see Sheeran not as he sees himself, but as he is seen by those closest to him. That means not just Hoffa and Bufalino, but also his family. One of the film’s key sequences sees Sheeran take his daughter Peggy with him as he attacks a grocer in retribution for disciplining his girl in his shop. As Sheeran stomps on the hands of the fallen grocer, Scorsese cuts repeatedly to Peggy’s horrified face. It’s the first of many pivotal wordless scenes, each more tense than the one prior, until it culminates at the emotional climax of the film.
There is much to say of Martin Scorsese’s directorial choices. In his first collaboration with Al Pacino—something both marveled at during a post-premiere Q&A, given that they have been friends and admired one another’s work since the early ‘70s—he does not try to recapture the glory of the rich and subtle performances of Pacino’s heyday. Instead, he takes advantage of the particular histrionics that mark the actor’s recent work by casting him as the larger-than-life Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa, as the film notes (with a shocking degree of self-awareness), is now famous mostly for disappearing, but his role as the president of the Teamsters, then America’s largest and most powerful union, made him only marginally less famous than Elvis or The Beatles in his day. Pacino’s performance is great not despite the scenery chewing tendencies he has adopted with age, but because of them; Scorsese channels those theatrics to create an appropriately larger-than-life figure of the charismatic Hoffa and plays many of his scenes for humor.
Humor, as it happens, is present throughout The Irishman, which helps disguise the fact that it consists largely of people sitting in rooms talking. One could never be certain of what might happen to characters in Scorsese’s earlier mob stories—even those based on real people were fictionalized to some extent and populated with so many supporting characters that a few deaths were bound to surprise. This time, we know from the beginning that Hoffa will disappear and Sheeran will wind up in an assisted living home. With so few major characters killed on screen (most are introduced with a caption informing the audience how that person was killed, but it inevitably occurs off-screen and only in the smallest margins of the narrative) and therefore no need to prolong the depiction of hits or ramp up suspense, humor becomes the primary means of keeping the film moving.
And move it does—back and forth, through both time and space. The Irishman begins with a typically impressive tracking shot, this one going down the hall of an assisted living home before finding one particular old man: Frank Sheeran, sitting in a wheelchair and played by Robert De Niro. Throughout the film, Sheeran speaks directly to the camera, recounting his time as a member of the Bufalino crime family and as a union activist and eventual right-hand man of Hoffa. De Niro’s wrinkled face calls forth his fabled career playing precisely these kinds of characters, from the big-timers of Goodfellas and Casino to the small-timers of Mean Streets and the lone psychopaths like Travis Bickle, whose misanthropy is only a small step from a mobster’s entitlement. His narration, meanwhile, gives way to flashbacks to his road-trip with mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci, out of an unofficial semi-retirement)—which acts as a secondary framing device and whose purpose becomes evident only late in the film—as well as to a chronological tale of Sheeran’s introduction to and rise within the family. Immediately, then, the tug and omnipresence of the past is felt in the present (an idea explored in the lighter but equally profound Hugo).
As the film hops through time, so too do our actors. Much was made in advance of Scorsese’s decision to digitally de-age his stars for numerous scenes in the film, and so necessary did Scorsese consider the effect that he put off the film until it could be performed to his satisfaction. The viewer may be a bit harder to satisfy: we may be convinced by the faces of the De Niros of years and even decades past, but the challenge posed to actors in their mid- and late-70s—to act like a man 10, 20, 30 years younger—is too much. The mannerisms of the older, present-day De Niro look out of place on the younger version, and it isn’t until one forces themselves to start seeing characters rather than actors, or until the characters themselves get at least a bit closer in age to their actors, that this uncanniness vanishes.
Yet despite how severely it can detract from the drama, The Irishman needs this uncanniness. To cast different actors to play characters at different stages in their lives—even if Sheeran were portrayed only by one young actor in flashbacks (made up to look older as the film went along) and by De Niro in his old age—the film would be ruined. The Irishman is about aging and mortality, and the strangeness of watching the body of an old De Niro, complete with young face, stomp on the hands of a common grocer is also an unmistakable reminder that bodies and faces change, but an action, once taken, persists forever. For this reason too, the double-frame is a necessary gambit. It may lack the elegance of Scorsese’s best films (although it is far from clumsy), but it forces us to regularly adjust to and consider De Niro’s new digital face, which itself justifies and alleviates the sudden change of tone in the film’s final, contrite act, consisting entirely of Sheeran in the nursing home.
That final act arrives after around three hours spent jumping through time with De Niro. The Irishman, as almost anyone who has read anything about it knows, is 210 minutes long. It is long for a movie, but could a film so heavily concerned with what it means for time to pass and wrinkles to accrue on a face justify a shorter length? The question of duration and biography is as old as narrative art itself, and a topic of interest for everyone from Homer to Proust to Knausgaard. To watch a biography of such unconventional length on screen is to be forced to ponder the relationship not just between screen time and narrative time but between cinematic time and real time.
Indeed, similar questions about time haunt Sheeran in the nursing home. He realizes what Scorsese has carefully suggested by including historical events throughout the film.. History takes place on one timeline, grand and unending; humans live on a more modest one. Consequently, Sheeran’s agency was minimal, and even the bosses he served were often at the mercy of historical forces beyond their control. Our choices are much smaller—to be there or not for those who need us or to follow or not follow orders when they challenge our conscience rather than to alter history—and all any of us are left with are the impressions we leave on others. Perhaps that means, as it does for Sheeran, that you will grow old, wrecked by guilt for betraying friends and never being a good husband or father, grieved by none. Or perhaps it means, as it does for Scorsese and De Niro, that your work will outlive you, and you can be remembered as the mobsters they have so artfully depicted over the decades always dreamt they would be.
"While governments wait for orders, our people take action." 20th Century Fox has debuted the main full-length trailer for The King's Man, an exciting new prequel movie in Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman series. The first teaser dropped in the summer, but this official trailer is even better. Damn this looks awesome! Once again directed by Matthew Vaughn, in this one we go back to the days of World War I, aka The Great War, to tell the origin story of "the very first independent intelligence agency." Taron Egerton as Eggsy isn't in this one, it's a whole new cast. Featuring an outstanding set of actors. Ralph Fiennes headlines, along with Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, Daniel Brühl, plus Djimon Hounsou, and Charles Dance. The more footage we see, the more impressed I am by this. Looking great so far! All the action seems thrilling in addition to the distinct look & feel of the film.
Here's the full-length trailer (+ new poster) for Matthew Vaughn's The King's Man, from Fox's YouTube:
You can still watch the first teaser trailer for Vaughn's The King's Manhere, to see the initial reveal again.
As a collection of history's worst tyrants and criminal masterminds gather to plot a war to wipe out millions, one man must race against time to stop them. Discover the origins of the very first independent intelligence agency in The King's Man movie arriving early 2020.The King's Man is once again directed by English filmmaker Matthew Vaughn, of the first Kingsman: The Secret Service movie and its sequel The Golden Circle, as well as the films Layer Cake, Stardust, Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class previously. The screenplay is written by Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn, co-written by Karl Gajdusek; based on the comic book "The Secret Service" by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. 20th Century Fox will release Vaughn's The King's Man in theaters everywhere starting February 14th, 2020 next year. How does it look? Who's in?
DB and KT, front row center, at the screening of The Lighthouse. Photo by Shelly “Sales Agent Cinema” Kraicer.
DB here:
Storytelling cinema depends on characters, and our relations to them. At the level of individual scenes, we can be more or less restricted to what they experience; we can know as much as they do, or more, or less. Across a film, the filmmaker can attach us consistently to one or two characters, or instead roam freely among many viewpoints. And within a scene, the filmmaker’s choice of camera placement can put us “with” one character or another.
In other words, narrative cinema 101. But it’s worth remembering that these are forced choices. As a filmmaker, you can have restricted or unrestricted access to characters, but at every moment you have to choose one or the other. How objective or subjective will you make your presentation? Will you limit your camera setups or go for ubiquity–that tendency to give us shots divorced from the immediate situation? Examples are a drone-delivered image above a city, or that sudden high or low angle that calls our attention to a detail the characters may have missed.
Three films at the Vancouver Film Festival presented a nice menu of attachment options–ways in which we can be tied to our protagonist. All are well worth your attention, so without getting too much into spoilers, I’ll use them as an occasion to study how these forced choices are handled creatively.
The party’s over
Take as a midrange example The Realm (El Reino, 2018), a Spanish political thriller directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Manuel López Vidal is a brisk, no-nonsense functionary enjoying the good life thanks to the corruption of his party. He and his colleagues, the Amadeus Group, meet regularly over expensive meals to plan their schemes of influence-peddling and money laundering. They tease their fastidious accountant about his meticulous ledgers, but those records will become important to Manuel when one colleague leaks incriminating audio tapes of Manuel’s dealmaking. There’s an orgy of document shredding, damage control among the party’s top brass, and the growing likelihood that Manuel will go to jail.
The screenplay restricts nearly all the action to Manuel. This method is established at the start, when a long tracking shot follows him from the beach as he strides into an Amadeus lunch. Thereafter, we’re with him as he learns of the danger he’s in and mounts one tactic after another to save himself. At a couple of moments the camera lingers on his colleagues’ reactions after he’s left the scene, but on the whole we’re firmly attached to him. Some virtuoso long takes, including a ten-minute shot that follows Manuel’s frantic search for the ledgers, virtually fetishize our adhesion to the protagonist.
By and large, the presentation doesn’t delve into his mind. The throbbing techno score conveys his growing panic as he strides from one confrontation to another, but we get no voice-overs, or flashbacks, or mental imagery. And we don’t see Manuel confide his plans to others (although he seems to have told his wife some of them offscreen). This degree of objectivity allows more suspense, as his schemes to save himself unfold in the moment. We must figure out why he’s bracing one colleague, or bursting into a friend’s home in the course of a teenage party. His manic resourcefulness is all the more impressive when he keeps dodging new problems, often revising his plan on the fly.
It’s no easy feat to maintain tension across two hours, especially when we’re asked to invest our sympathy in a corrupt politician, but The Realm manages it. It’s achieved partly through the trim, crisp performance of Antonio de la Torre but also through plot and style: the refusal of omniscient narration (say, showing us the police or party officials tracking him) and a mild degree of camera ubiquity that accentuates the character’s plight, whether in a meeting or all alone.
The Realm is a good example of how manipulating character attachment can strongly engage the audience. We know just enough to understand Manuel’s crisis, but without access to his mind, each scene can yield a surprise when he comes up with a new survival stratagem.
A lot from a little
I hadn’t really considered the Dardennes brothers “minimalist” filmmakers, but seeing Young Ahmed brought home to me how strictly they’ve limited their cinematic palette. Given their emphasis on actors and faces, you might think they rely on the sort of “intensified continuity” on display in modern film and television. Yet they’re far more purist than that, and they take objective presentation further than does Sorogoyen.
They seldom use long shots, let alone establishing shots: a scene starts in medias res with character action, shot from quite close. Filming in handheld long takes, they avoid shot/reverse-shot cutting, either panning between participants in a dialogue or simply framing them in tight two-shots.
The Dardennes minimize camera ubiquity. Not for them the picturesque, distant shots that The Realm sometimes provides. In a car carrying two passengers, the camera isn’t lashed to the hood or filming alongside; it’s in the back seat.
True, cutting yields some ubiquity. When Ahmed’s teacher pursues him through a classroom, she runs ahead of us but then, in the next shot, she catches up with him as he’s about to leave the building.
Like most cuts, it’s an instantaneous change of position that a real observer couldn’t execute. Still, this frame-edge cut creates simple continuity, driven by dramatic necessity and barely noticeable. The cut is softened by a staging that neatly settles into a standard over-the-shoulder setup.
Apparently uninterested in pictorial composition, these filmmakers simply center their subjects in undistinguished framings. No shot becomes strikingly lit or framed. There’s no nondiegetic music, and the soundtrack is subdued; of all modern filmmakers, they benefit least from surround channels.
As in The Realm, the Dardennes’ minimalist approach works well in tying us to the protagonist, while also denying us direct access to his mind. Ahmed, an adolescent in Liège, has given up video games for fundamentalist Islam. Convinced by his imam that his classroom teacher has become an apostate, he decides to take action against her.
His plans emerge wholly through his actions. Without benefits of voice-over, subjective sequences, or flashbacks, we must infer how he will respond to the demands of the Qu’ran as he has been taught to understand it.
The Dardennes’ objectivity doesn’t make the plot hard to follow. A dozen minutes into the film, the premises are clear, the main characters (Ahmed’s mother, his imam, his teacher) are delineated, and Ahmed’s motivation is established. At the half-hour point, his mission is launched. Apart from the ellipsis I mentioned, everything that follows stems from the dramatic premises. And however horrifying Amed’s plans may be, the wistful, pursed-mouth young actor Idir Ben Addi is mesmerically angelic. His glasses make him look adorable.
The style also keeps everything clear. The texture is close to that of documentary filmmaking, but of course the Dardennes’ films are scripted and staged. There’s a high degree of artifice in their apparently artless method. As in the more flamboyant Birdman, their long takes catch every reaction and gesture with great precision.
We always see what we need to see at just the right moment. When something is suppressed–here, the result of a violent knife attack–it’s not an accident (as if the camera were in the wrong spot) but rather the result of our attachment to Ahmed and a clever narrative ellipsis. We could have had a cut like the one in the school, but we remain with Ahmed, and in fact know a bit less than he does about the result of the violence.
All of which is not to deny the originality of Young Ahmed. All the Dardennes films seem modest, but they are, within their limits, quite ambitious in using dramatic psychology to probe social problems. Throughout, I think, we are asked to reflect on how firmly Ahmed believes in his version of Islam. Is it a transitory teen obsession or is he on his way to becoming a dogmatic martyr? We watch his behavior, his encounters with farm life and a young girl, for any signs that his lonely, taciturn demeanor will crack. In other words, this is a suspense film–one based less on the threat of violence (which is there, to be sure) than on how a boy who hasn’t fully formed his character will define himself.
Not such light housekeeping
Both The Realm and Young Ahmed are, to varying degrees, objective in their presentation. We must judge characters by what they do and say. Something very different is going on in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse. It too adheres largely to one character, but a battery of cinematic techniques, including camera ubiquity, works to plunge us into the man’s mind.
Although the film is a two-hander, it doesn’t balance viewpoints. Thomas Wake, an experienced lighthouse supervisor, arrives at his post with the novice Ephraim Winslow. Almost immediately we are attached to Winslow, who’s assigned grimy menial duties while Wake tends the beacon. Wake tells Winslow that his previous assistant went mad from the weeks of isolation, and very quickly Winslow struggles against the bleak, craggy island they’re on.
We’re prepared for an assault on your senses by the opening, when a ship roars out of the fog toward us. Thereafter, Wake subjects Winslow to a punishing routine of cleaning the cistern, heaving coal into the boiler, and scrubbing floors, while nightly meals with the nattering old salt are just as hard to bear. Winslow’s misery is rendered in vivid, expressionist terms. The deafening fog horns, thunderclaps, and boiler blasts are reinforced by stark, ominous black-and-white imagery. (The film was shot on 35mm film.) Winslow seems trapped in a world of raging elements and gigantic machines.
Eggers builds our affinity with Winslow through classic techniques. He watches Wake at the beacon from a distance; we get optical point-of-view shots of discoveries (real? imagined?) that start to unhinge him.
All the drudgery and pain, punctuated by Wake’s continual harangues and farts, lead Winslow into fantasies and hallucinations. His deterioration is rendered in shock cuts and distended compositions reminiscent of Welles’ Mr. Arkadin or German’s Hard to Be a God. Some will compare the film’s over-the-top climax to that of Aronofsky’s Mother!, but The Lighthouse, with its rapid montage and Gothic chiaroscuro, harks back to silent cinema. The fact that it’s shot in the 1:1.17 ratio favored by early sound film gives it an archaic feel as well. The dialogue, a late title informs us, is drawn from nineteenth-century sources, including Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett.
The Lighthouse has a cadence typical of modern horror films, but Kristin points out that it’s an expressionistic Kammerspiel too–a subjectively tinted drama setting very few characters in a constrained locale. Eggers shows that you can renew a genre’s appeals by reviving imagery from a classic period of film history. When you do it, you’ll still have to make fundamental choices about viewpoint and camera placement. They come with the territory.
We thank Alan Franey, PoChu Auyeung, Jenny Lee Craig, Mikaela Joy Asfour, and their colleagues at VIFF for all their kind assistance. Thanks as well to Bob Davis and Shelly Kraicer for invigorating conversations about movies.
For more on classic Kammerspiel films go here and here.
Movies can be split into two camps: stories about the beautiful people and stories about the weirdos. Daniel Scheinert only wants to watch the weirdos. The co-director of Swiss Army Man has temporarily severed from his partner-in-crime, Dan Kwan, to focus attention on his home state of Alabama and all the delicious weirdos who populate the region. The Death of Dick Long is a hilarious and mysterious misadventure that periodically dips its audience into dark wells of sadness. While watching, I was often unsure of the origin of my tears. Was laughter the culprit, or something more sinister? The answer is less interesting than the conversation that the question elicits.
I spoke with Scheinert in the Midnight Manor karaoke room of The Highball in Austin, Texas. Fantastic Fest was in full swing and I was struggling with a series of complicated feelings regarding The Death of Dick Long. The movie dumped me in a low place with the gears of its empathy machine grinding my emotions to mush. Thankfully, a few hours after such internal combat, I had access to the filmmaker directly, and he provided much aid to my garbled innards.
Our conversation begins with my response to the film’s climax (don’t worry, we do not spoil plot specifics) and then we turn towards Scheinert’s initial reaction to the screenplay, as well as how the film evolved through casting and production. Scheinert cares deeply for the people within his films — both the fictional players and the actors who wear them. Their enjoyment on set means a great deal to the director, and he firmly believes that if he can put extra effort into protecting his crew’s physical safety then he can put just as much energy into guarding their psychological comfort. The world could use more artists with such heart.
Here is our conversation in full:
Man, I came out of the movie last night and I was shocked at how sad I was. Like I really engaged with those characters and I felt for every one of those characters.
Yeah?
And it was very funny — extremely funny — but it never felt mean-spirited or mocking. How did you go about steering that tone with those characters?
I spent a while unpacking what we were going for scene by scene with Billy [Chew], who wrote it. Unpacking where we wanted to leave people so that by the time we were shooting, we had a pretty good idea of where on the empathy roller coaster we were at different points of the film, you know? That was how I internalized what I was going for with each scene. Whether you’re on their side or not at certain parts. But, you know, as a testament to his writing, I really just kind of dug into the text whenever I was in doubt because this script just kind of resonated with me on a level that was hard to academically explain. And I love movies like that. I kind of turned back to it and just tried to make sure with every scene: Was it worth it on a dramatic level? Was it a little playful as well, so that it was never just bleak?
What was your headspace when you got done reading the script that first time?
I’ve read so many drafts over the years. I’m trying to remember the first. I remember when he finally cracked the ending. My headspace was worried it was too bleak, but it kind of fucked me up. Just like those guys at the end keep going.
Yeah. Agreed. Same.
They just like kind of shrug shit off, you know? And it starts all over again with a new girl. Even though it’s funny and you really care about their friendship, they really put in this jokey but bleak space. It starts all over again.
Yeah, as I said, I came out of that feeling very complicated about the movie. It’s funny as hell, but there is a lot to process there.
Are you married or do you have kids?
I am married. I don’t have kids.
I find the movie resonates differently with married men.
How so?
On a certain level, it’s a different movie for married men then it is for married women, and it’s different for kids of divorce. People come at the movie from different corners. There’s a certain nervous adult man laugh that I love listening to.
That could have been me. [Laughter]
Sometimes I’ll be sitting near someone and I’m like, “Oh, this is hitting close to home for that guy.” [Laughter]
It’s weird because you set it up as this mystery surrounding what happened to Dick Long, and we’re not going to talk spoilers here, but when you finally reveal what’s happened, you know, it felt like, “Oh, am I watching a really intense version of Dumb People Town?” Are you familiar with the podcast?
No. Dumb People Town?
Yeah. It’s the Sklar brothers podcast where they find a news article regarding an absurd situation and then they break it down. Some random Florida man gets stuck in a refrigerator.
Yeah. That’s my shit.
So you should listen to Dumb People Town.
Cool.
Yeah, so The Death of Dick Long is the most intense and sad version of that show.
Yeah. Yeah.
How did your relationship with the material evolve over the course of the production, from those early screenplays to shooting the script to editing it all together?
It changes every step of the way. It’s a really weird exercise. As a filmmaker, you have to get so into the weeds with these characters. Then you also have to imagine being the first-time viewer and try to ignore everything I know about the characters and all the context that I’m excited about. Specifically, you have to consider someone who has just met these characters, watching the film for the first time. What are they going to feel? I have to make sure that I’m being a helpful guide to those folks.
That’s hard. By the time I’ve cast the characters, I’ve fallen in love with all of them and I’m working with them all on set all the time. I forget sometimes that people will be shocked, you know? I’m just busy thinking about what Zeke is up to in this moment and how stressed he is and how hard that is to act cool in front of these cops, you know? Yeah, so I made up an arc in my head of what I wanted the audience to go through, and I would use that like a roadmap every once in a while to go back to in the edit and on set.
So you’re constantly thinking about the audience during the process of production?
A ton. Yeah. And like when Dan Kwan and I are writing, a lot of times I pitch ideas, not based on character motivations, but based on audience reactions. And I’ll be like, “Oh, the audience will be like this. Oh, they’ll gasp because they’ll feel this. Or what they’re going to think is happening is this.” And as opposed to like what Zeke would do is this. Sometimes it’s dangerous, but that’s cinema. You’re basically creating a little theme park ride. And if you forget that — I don’t like those movies.
You don’t want to sell them a lie.
Right? With some movies, you think maybe it should’ve just been a book or a news article. If all you want to do is convince me of your political opinion, then write a great journalistic piece of work. Don’t make a pseudo-narrative biopic that’s filled with factual inaccuracies. [Laughter] Shots fired, First Man! Oh, drop a fricking thing on the moon. That didn’t happen. [Laughter]
Oh, man. So First Man was a really intense experience for me. Awesome filmmaking. Love the space race stuff. Obsessed with that stuff.
Really?
Yeah, but then, some of that biopic nonsense? Made it a very strange watch for me.
So weird.
Yeah. We could get on a real tangent here, but I guess I’ll spare you. [Laughter] Let’s talk about your casting. The moment you cast these actors in these parts, the narrative changes. What surprises did this cast offer you?
It’s one of my favorite parts of filmmaking and this one was my favorite ever to cast because it was such an ensemble of juicy roles. We got greenlit and it wasn’t casting-contingent. You know, like chasing celebrities can be kind of exhausting. Whereas in this case, I just got to meet interesting southerners. Everybody who’s in the movie auditioned. Except for Roy Wood Jr, I guess. And Sunita [Manii]? No, she auditioned. Myself. I didn’t have to audition. But anyway, it was so fun. I try to have a loose idea of what the character’s going to be when I’m casting. Because so often casting is just like some director looking for a 5’7″ woman who’s about 170 pounds with curly hair because that’s what he imagined, you know?
It’s a waste of their time to make them even audition. So we auditioned men and women for Sheriff Spencer. I’m just looking for fascinating people who are going to elevate it and keep me curious and surprise me. And it was so fun. The cast is probably 60 percent trained actors and 40 percent just people sort of playing themselves who came in. Like folks who had never been in a movie. It was really fun to have people like Virginia [Newcomb], who is just like the most incredible actress I’ve ever worked with, but then also get to like make a weirdo feel comfortable and then capture that moment. “Cool. We got it. We got that weird dude on camera.” Like mixing those.
So talk about like capturing the weird dudes. How do you do direct the found actors versus seasoned veterans?
I feel like most actors, the way I like to work with them is just to make them feel comfortable and help them just not overthink it and believe in the lie of filmmaking. You know, help them to not notice the lights. That works on both sides. I try to have a light touch and not come in and be like, “Here’s the 20 things I want you to be thinking about while you do this scene.” And just cast people who are smart and interesting in the first place.
Each actor has a different method. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going to make that person feel comfortable. Shooting them first or shooting them second, you know? Really talking more with them so that they feel like they know what I want or not talking to them at all so that they’re not overthinking it. And yeah, this cast ran the gamut. Some people really wanted to talk about their backstories and some people didn’t.
Maintaining your actors’ comfort is important to you. Especially your child actor.
Poppy.
You mentioned in the Q&A that you did not want this film to be a job for her. You wanted her experience to be like camp. What’s your concern there?
I guess I’m that judgy parent at the playground who is like, “I don’t think you should be parenting that way.” I think child acting is crazy. And just from the little glimpses I’ve seen of it and I did it a little. As a kid, I got into theatre when I was young and then I started auditioning for some movie stuff or commercial stuff and it was not the same as doing community theater. It was not fun. It wasn’t camp. It wasn’t nourishing. I wasn’t growing. I was self-conscious about how I looked and what I was wearing and, luckily, my mom noticed that and was like, “Daniel’s not enjoying this.” And she’s like, “Do you want to keep doing this?” And I was like, “No, let’s just keep doing theatre.”
I was extra sensitive with this one because the movie is rated R and fucked up. So like if Poppy came in really thinking of it as like, “I’m the star of a movie,” then she’d want to know what the movie was about and she would want to watch the movie. I wanted it to be something where she just came to set when she came to set and had fun and got to see what movies are like and said some lines that she only had to say them, you know, a couple of times. She’s not memorizing this scene about a father abandoning her for weeks and searing that into her little child brain. Instead, it’s just like we have an exercise one afternoon.
But you went as far as to make sure she’s not even saying some of the profanity or hearing what the profanity of the film is.
Yeah.
Why so stringent on that?
It was sort of just an exercise. Like her parents were really cool about it and I know filmmakers who’ve been able to do some pretty dark things with kids in an ethical way. But I just thought it would be fun to try. We go out of our way to do stunts safely and not hurt someone. And it wasn’t that hard to just do a few movie magic tricks to make the child not have a traumatic experience. Because honestly, you do hear some stories about how they get performances out of kids and it’s fucked up. It’s not okay. I love City of God, but I think the one kid who’s crying at gunpoint was crying at gunpoint.
Sure. It’s not cool.
No way, man. I will never make that movie.
And clearly, you have found a way to stay true to the vision that you have and not traumatize a child or traumatize really anybody on the set.
Right. And also, the movie is sort of critiquing the repercussions that keeping a secret can have on your family. And it would be hypocritical if the movie was being bad to a kid, you know? Like, yeah. I don’t want Poppy to go through what Cynthia goes through.
Sure. Makes sense.
For her to have a traumatic experience as an eight-year-old on set? It would make me a bad filmmaker. Same with the horse. We’re like, this horse has to have a blast on set. We’re not going to abuse animals here, man.
Glad to hear that for Comet’s sake — or whatever Comet’s real name is.
Pecos. He was great. Horses are very nervous creatures. They’re pack animals. If they’re by themselves, they get nervous. So, Pecos came with friends. Off-camera are two other horses just peeing and shitting while we’re filming, and like eating hay.
To make him feel comfortable?
Yeah. Because then he’s a lot calmer and you can shoot for longer without him getting antsy because his buddies are right there. But they literally would just start peeing in the middle of takes and like just off-camera these two other monstrous horses. I’m at the monitor and it could eat my hair, you know? [Laughter] And then they’d go on walks together.
How’d you ultimately land on the look of the movie?
Ashley Connor shot it. After she read it, she then sent over all these references of Robbie Müller, who’s like a da Vinci of film. I loved that her first impulse was to make Alabama colorful and not drab and dirty and kind of sepia. We ran with that. We wanted this to be a vivid small-town America movie, not a drab one.
And then a lot of the choices kind of came from the story and the process and wanting to shoot it in a way that would maximize the performances. So, using handheld or not, a lot of times, was kind of dictated by the energy of the scene and just how precise or not precise we want it to be. Because a lot of times Dan and my work is really precise because there’s visual effects involved, you know? And we have to really have a fucking plan. It was really fun to do a movie where we could be a little looser and like lighten the room and just let the scene kind of take shape as it went and not worry about where the green screen is going to go.
There were a couple of sequences, like Zeke attacking the lamp, where we got to keep things kind of loose. It was really fun. Ashley is a very involved, in-the-story cinematographer, not at her monitor, tweaking lights. She really cares about the characters and which part of the story we’re telling today.
And that allows you to improvise on the day?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she’s encouraging that and she likes surprises and she has thoughts on where the character’s at and she’s communicating and getting to know the actors. And that was really fun to do this time.
The Death of Dick Longopens this Friday in select theaters.
This article is part of Tropes Week, in which we’re exploring our favorite tropes from cinema history. Read more here.
It’s a universal truth that food is the gateway to happiness. The appeal of popular films like Ratatouille,Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and Julie & Julia lies in how effectively they all communicate the power of food and the joys of cooking. Ratatouille is especially effective at emphasizing the emotional connection people (and Parisian rats) have with food, and how one amazing meal can literally change your life. Its ability to communicate this feeling is arguably why the film is considered Pixar’s greatest achievement.
“I don’t like food… I love it.”
The fact is, big things happen over a good meal. In film, these “big” moments can range from miserably funny (American Beauty’s cringe-worthy family dinners) to gruesome (Alien being the prime example of dinnertime gone wrong). Yet even when nothing extraordinary is happening in the scene, sharing a meal feels poignant in some way or another. It’s one of the most companionable acts we take as people.
Ordinary conversation takes on a new level of intimacy, and by the time the plates are cleared we can’t help but feel that the characters have become infinitely closer. This unique feeling becomes even stronger when one person has actually cooked the meal themselves, becoming a trope that films ranging from romance to drama take full advantage of. Because really, who can resist the charm of a culinary-minded love interest creating a meal from scratch for the item of their affections.
Cooking exists as the perfect vehicle for romance, or as a tool to create closer bonds between characters, simply because it’s something we can all relate to. Ask anyone — a full stomach is the key to the heart, and being cooked for carries a strong sense of being nurtured. This cozy energy ensures that the pivotal moments occurring in these scenes have the necessary weight while giving the audience plenty of warm and fuzzies. It’s why so many foodie films also carry strong romantic themes.
Preparing dinner for a loved one always has the potential to take a dark turn as well, and twisty plotlines can even become more fun this way. They’re great at making you think about how much trust we really put in someone cooking a meal for us. Outside the realm of adoring chefs cooking for their beau lies the deliciously sick romance of Phantom Thread’s poisoned omelets, for example. The power of food is made very literal in this case. Some people might go for that kind of thing, though, as we see by the end of the film.
“Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick.”
By far the best use of culinary courtship occurs when a character who works in or owns a restaurant cooks for someone inside their place of business. This can either be the protagonist cooking for their love interest or vice versa. A veritable chef’s kiss to a solid after-hours restaurant scene (an AHRS, if you will). These scenes are special because they often involve one character inviting the other into their world, showing them their passions firsthand. Even Final Destination 5 gives us quality AHRS content, although that particular sweet moment does end with a deranged side character entering the restaurant armed with a gun. But no date is perfect.
In most cases, however, these kinds of cooking scenes are an indication that a more reserved or taciturn character has started to open up and grow closer to the other person. Guilty-pleasure Katherine Heigl flick Life as We Know It employs this so effectively that it manages to color the rest of the film in a happy glow. Heigl’s character, Holly, has a lifelong dream of turning her bakery into a successful restaurant, which remains quietly unfinished for the majority of the film.
As Holly and the gradually tolerable male lead (Josh Duhamel) grow closer, she brings him in after-hours for a date. He watches her prepare the food, literally bathed in buttery romantic light, as predictably high strung Holly comments that this is the only place in life where she doesn’t follow a plan. Their private dinner is a brief, sweet interlude in the film that marks a dramatic turning point in their relationship, in part due to the intimate nature of Holly sharing her life’s passion, as well as him seeing a new side of her.
Spanglish utilizes this trope in an even more pivotal manner. Chef John (Adam Sandler) has just found out that his wife has been unfaithful and spontaneously decides to take maid and secret crush Flor (Paz Vega) to his restaurant, unable to remain at home.
The increasing tension between the two comes to a head here as they keep a strict physical distance yet finally say out loud everything they’ve been feeling all along. The restaurant becomes their momentary hideaway as Flor sits watching John cook five-star meals, Hans Zimmer’s cello-heavy score acting as the perfect backdrop. It’s a much-needed respite for the two to finally act on their own volition, neither wanting the spell to break, until Flor pulls them back to reality.
Instead of another instance of wooing via food, this restaurant scene serves as the entirety of the relationship and what it could have been — before it all ends just as quickly. John cooking a meal for Flor is also a crucial moment in that she is allowing herself to be taken care of for once. The food in this scene is used to openly exchange feelings, the dinner becoming more than just John letting Flor into his world. It’s also his gift to her in appreciation of who she is and how she has impacted his life.
The meal is not only a loving gesture but significant in that it is a standard Cuban dish from the Miami hometown Chiron has been removed from for so long, physically and emotionally. The conversation that follows is monumental as well as it catches up the pair on their lives since we last saw them in adolescence.
These scenes ultimately work so well at giving us all the feels because of the nurturing emotions exuded. Confessions of love in the rain and airport near-misses give us dewy eyes, yes, but these tropes lack the full flavor of someone putting their heart and soul into a meal for another person. Whether it be poisonous mushrooms or Malibu’s best haute cuisine, at the end of the day the best kind of romance comes from good food and good company.
This article is part of Tropes Week, in which we’re exploring our favorite tropes from cinema history. Read more here.
Yesterday is not a movie about a world without The Beatles. No more than Aladdin is a movie about a world with a sudden new princedom or Splash is a movie about the existence of mermaids. Yesterday is your typical romantic comedy with a fantastical fairytale component that provides the film with a unique spin on conventional genre tropes while also allowing for clever jokes and an exaggerated take on a very familiar premise.
It’s easy to get hung up on the Beatles thing. Yesterday follows a struggling singer/songwriter, Jack (Himesh Patel), who, following a mysterious global electrical surge, wakes up and finds himself the only person to know about John, Paul, George, and Ringo and all their brilliant songs. He takes advantage of the situation by passing off everything from “She Loves You” to “The Long and Winding Road” as his own, which eventually brings him fame and fortune.
On the one hand, the premise is just a gimmicky rehash of the usual story of the rising star, particularly one where the hero realizes what he’s lost along the way, both in terms of what’s inside himself and physically the friends and loves left behind. Because of the sci-fi/fantasy aspect of Yesterday‘s catalyst, the movie has a Faustian feel to it, as Jack seems to have a sudden gift in which music and lyrics to masterpiece after masterpiece magically come to him.
And he experiences moral anxiety as a result of the secrets and lies. Stories in which people pass others’ work as their own tend to be darker, whether dramatic a la Morvern Callar or as black comedy like in World’s Greatest Dad. Because it’s typically a dead person’s work. In Yesterday, Jack has the benefit of the songs being by people who seem to have never existed at all, at least as far as the rest of the world is concerned. But the viewer knows, and we may judge him for it.
The big lie in romantic comedy doesn’t normally involve a secret that only the audience knows — that only the audience can know. Otherwise, there’s no buildup of lies on top of the original lie leading to a major miscommunication that threatens the romantic relationship on the basis of deception and mistrust. Yesterday does reveal other characters who might expose Jack’s lie. But the movie mostly deals with his personal struggle with the lie and the internal guilt he feels.
Yesterday’s use of the big lie doesn’t impact the romantic narrative the way we expect in rom-coms, either. Normally, whether it be in a sitcom like The Honeymooners or Perfect Strangers or a movie such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Shop Around the Corner, While You Were Sleeping, About a Boy, and numerous titles involving Shakespearean disguise or Pygmalion-inspired wagers, and even the fantastical varieties like Aladdin, Splash, any body-swap film, it’s a love interest who is most hurt by the secret or lie, after which the lying party must make it up to him or her to set things right.
In this movie, the love interest, Jack’s gal pal and manager, Ellie (Lily James), is greatly affected by the big lie. Passing the Beatles song as his own takes Jack across the world to the machinations of the record industry and marketing meetings and away from the one person who always loved and believed in him. He’s not necessarily directly lying to her, and he doesn’t even know about the romantic connection anyway, yet the lie does wind up separating them physically and then personally, not due to a trust issue but because he screws up his priorities.
By traditional rom-com plotting, Jack does hurt another woman more with his big lie, though she is not a love interest. Playing with the trope with non-romantic pairings isn’t that uncommon lately, especially in “bromance” pictures. In Yesterday, it’s a business relationship. The lie draws in Debra (Kate McKinnon), a big-time agent from Los Angeles, and when the lie is revealed, she is the most upset. Understandably, due to her financial investment in the lie. But Jack never needs to win her back by regaining her trust. She’s the non-romantic “romantic false lead,” the Aldus Snow, the Tad Hamilton, the Idina Menzel character in Enchanted, the Baxter/Ralph Bellamy role. Ultimately rejected for the hero’s realized true love.
Of course, the seemingly silly premise, which surely has turned off a lot of people from watching what’s essentially just another Richard Curtis charmer, does weigh on the movie tremendously because of how extreme and exaggerated the situation is. The kind that leaves a lot of people wondering more about the details of a world without the Beatles than the details of genre subversion. It has to be such a big lie, though, for the audience to believe this lie would work out so well.
And if we don’t think too much about what happened, how it happened, and what it means for everything and everyone whom the Beatles impacted from Terry Gilliam’s directorial career to the Manson Family murders, and if we ignore the contextual bases and meaning of most of the Beatles’ music and the context of half a century later (“I Saw Her Standing There” written today would raise some red flags), the premise does have some enjoyable fun with the gag, paying loving tribute to the group as recognition of their talent and cultural significance while also making a lot of jokes specific to the Fab Four and their songs (“Hey Jude” becoming “Hey Dude”) and generally about music and memory (the ongoing elusiveness of the “Eleanor Rigby” lyrics). It’s a very big premise but it can be appreciated in a lot of little ways if we suspend our belief and cynicism.
The extreme scope of the premise and the lie does benefit the movie in some ways with its ridiculousness. It distracts from the common tropes and cliches that aren’t tinkered with. For instance, having Ellie be the stereotypical best friend of the opposite sex who does so much for the main character, who takes her for granted and somehow never realizes she’s in love with him, that’s kind of dumber and more unbelievable than the whole world without the Beatles thing. But does the story work without that trope? Could she be known by Jack as a romantic possibility but one left behind when his career picks up — similar to all the first wives in music biopics back home taking care of the kids or just coping with abandonment or, in cases like Bohemian Rhapsody, the fact that the hero is gay? Perhaps, but then Jack’s third act realization of what he had all along from the start wouldn’t be so hugely felt, at least for him.
Yesterday makes plenty of attempts to remind the audience that the world without the Beatles thing is an inconsequential matter as far as the heart of the story is concerned. Nobody needs to be working out what a world without Coca-Cola, cigarettes, and/or Harry Potter actually looks like, either. It just so happens that Curtis and co-writer Jack Barth and director Danny Boyle use, in a tradition of what-if movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, Stranger Than Fiction, Groundhog Day, Big, and others, the ultimate example as far as cultural implications.
The movie has been dismissed for its gimmick, whether by serious Beatles fans (can you appreciate the pastiche of Across the Universe but not this?) or rom-com avoiders with an additional cheesy aspect to scoff at. But it was a huge sleeper hit during the summer, likely due to its charming leads and the understanding that it’s actually, beneath the overlying contrivance, a satisfyingly familiar and ordinary fairytale all the way to the extended happy ending.
