"Once Upon a Time....In Hollywood"

One of the most highly anticipated movies of the Summer Movie Season has been Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon A Time...in Hollywood".  The movie takes place in 1969, and while it is hard to come to terms that a movie that takes place during a time in which you yourself lived can be considered a "period piece", that is what Tarantino has given us.  He lovingly creates Los Angeles and Hollywood during the winter and summer of 1969, right down to the fashions, hairstyles, the movie marquees, and the songs being played on the AM radios in the cars that everyone is driving.  That's one thing to love about this movie.

Another is the story.  It centers around Rick Dalton, an aging, just about over-the-hill actor played by Leonardo DiCaprio.  His hit TV western series, "Bounty Hunter", has been long canceled, and he is reduced to playing bad guys on various TV series like "Mannix" and "The FBI".  The only hope to salvage his career, says hot shot producer Al Pacino, is to move to Italy and make spaghetti westerns, something he doesn't really want to do.  His long time buddy and stunt double, Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, really has become a has been, begging for work and being reduced to a driver and go-fer for DiCaprio's Dalton.  Dalton lives in a home in the Hollywood Hills, right next door to the home of hotshot director Roman Polanski and has movie starlet wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie).  Rick is hoping that maybe he can get to know him and maybe land a part in the next big Polanski movie.

The acting is superb.  I have never seen DiCaprio be bad in a movie, and he is great in this.  There is a scene where he converses with a young female child actress while on a movie lunch break that is wrenching.  Same for Pitt.  He just might be the key figure in the whole story, as he comes to terms with the decline in his career, as well as the discovery he makes when he picks up a young hippie teenager and drives her to her commune at the Spahn Movie Ranch.  Pitt is now 55 years old, believe it or not, and he shows every one of those years in this movie, and to good effect.  

Finally, there is Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate.  Young and beautiful, she plays Tate as a woman who can't believe that she has "made it" in the movie biz.  She is positively charming in a scene where she goes into a movie theater and watches herself on screen in a Dean Martin movie.  It is a wonderful scene.

Then there is the story itself.  You know all along that this story will end with that hot August night when Charles Manson sends his minions into the Hollywood Hills to do his evil will.  The tension in the build up to the event is palpable, and then.....well, I won't tell you what Tarantino does next, but remember, the name of the movie begins with "Once upon a time...."

I had a couple of concerns going into this one.  One, would it be a typical Tarantino bloodbath of gore and violence?  Also, at 2 hours and 40 minutes in length, would it be too long to sit through?

The answer to the first question is No, not a lot of gore and violence, although, given the subject matter, there is some of that.  As to the second question, the answer is also No.  Never looked at my watch once as the movie unfolded.

And as an added bonus, you also get a good look into the movie business.  How they get made, the schmoozing and politics that go into it, much of it often cutthroat, and how actors really "act" when they are being filmed.

I kind of knew that I would like this movie going into it, but it turned out better than I thought, and I ended up loving it, and I am not a Tarantino acolyte as so many people are.

This one get the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.

"Mary Queen of Scots"

For the second time in a week, I delved into a cinematic look at female British Monarchs ("l'll take female British Monarchs for a thousand, Alex") from long, long ago last night.  Last week it was "The Favourite", which told about Queen Anne in 1706.  Last night it was "Mary Queen of Scots", the story of the titular Queen and her, not sure what you would call it - her battles, rivalry, intramural tussles? - with Elizabeth I.  It starred Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth.  This one took place back in the 1580's or thereabouts.

I'll be brief with my takeaways on this movie:

1. It starred Saoirse Ronan, rapidly becoming one of my very favorite (as opposed to "favourite") actresses.  She alone makes a movie worth seeing, and she is the sole reason I watched this one. 
2. The filmmakers managed to do the impossible:  They made Margot Robbie look unattractive.
3. It was better than "The Favourite", but, that, admittedly, is setting a very low bar in this particular grandstand.

One and one-half stars from The Grandstander.

Two Movies and a Blackout

It was an interesting 36 or so hours this past Thursday and Friday that saw us seeing two movies and experiencing one significant inconvenience.

Let's take them in chronological order.

Thursday afternoon we saw the newest from director Steven Spielberg, "The Post".

For those of you too young to remember, or who have just plain forgotten about it, vey simply stated this is the story of the top secret documents back in 1971 that were leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, the documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.  The Papers discussed the mishandling and misleading (a nice word for "lying") by four Presidential administrations about the conduct of the United States in the Viet Nam war, and the conduct of a fifth Administration in subverting the first amendment.

Ellsberg first leaked the papers to the Times, and the Times published them.  The Nixon Administration then enjoined the Times from continuing to publish them.  At the same time the Washington Post came into possession of the Papers, and they had to make a decision as to whether or not to publish them themselves.  This was at a critical time for the Post, which was in the process of going from a privately owned family business to a publicly traded company.  It fell upon publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee

The real Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham

to make the decision:  Inform the public and defend the first amendment of the Constitution, or knuckle under to a bullying  President and all of his men.  The whole issue went before the Supreme Court, who ruled in favor of the Times and the Post, and, it might be argued, the American people.

The movie is well made and suspenseful, even though you know how it is going to end.  And it gives a great feeling for how it is, or at least how it used to be, to work at a newspaper (the building would literally shake when the presses that produced the newspaper would begin to run).  We attended this movie with friend Barb Vancheri, retired Film Critic for the Post-Gazette, and she said seeing the stories being written, the editorial meetings, and the actual production of the paper made her miss her job!

Attention must be paid to the terrific performances of Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in the roles of Graham and Bradlee.

Is it a surprise to anyone that they were both terrific in their roles?  A scene where Streep as Graham is talking on the phone and wrestling with the publish-or-not-publish decision is worth the price of the movie and is probably why she will get yet another Oscar nomination.  As for Hanks, he may suffer by comparison to Jason Robards, Jr. who played Bradlee in "All The President's Men", which is certainly understandable, but also unfair to him.  

The issues underlined in "The Post" are, sadly, still all too relevant in 2018, which makes this movie almost mandatory viewing for the civic minded among us, but it is also an exciting and dramatic bit of movie making.  And it also might compel one to rewatch the great "All The President's Men", never a bad thing.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

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"The Post" was pretty much going to be our movie going activity for the week, but along about midnight, electric power for much of McCandless and Franklin Park, about 2,500 homes, was lost.  Have any idea of just how dark  it gets when all of the various nightlights and luminescent clock dials in you home suddenly go out?  Or how cold it gets inside when it is subfreezing outside?

Well, the public utility that serves us told us that power would be restored by 1:00 PM, then it was 4:30, then it was 6:30, then it ws 8:30.  We were this close to packing up and heading to a local hotel when at 7:17 PM, we heard the fridge click on, and an instant later the lights came on and the furnace began running.  It was an unpleasant experience, but it made us grateful for how we live, and appreciative of what we have and sad knowing that there are folks out there who don't have such everyday conveniences at their disposal.

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So what do you do when it's too cold to stay in your home.  We went out for breakfast.  We had separate lunch dates with friends, Marilyn went to the Mall, and then we decided to go to another movie.  

The choice:

If you were around in 1994, what became known as the "Harding-Kerrigan Affair" is well known to you, but it can be shocking to think that for people under the age of thirty or so, the story told in "I, Tonya" is probably completely unknown to them.

Tonya Harding came up through a hard scrabble upbringing in Oregon to become a world class figure skater.  She competed in the 1992 Olympics, became the first woman to ever perform a triple axle in competition, became the American Champion, and on her way to competing in the 1994 Olympics, her chief competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, was knee-capped at the behest of her husband and some of the gang-that-couldn't-straight entourage that surrounded her.  Was Harding complicit in the attack?  She still says, no, but even after seeing the movie, you still don't know whether to believe her or not.

One thing you know for sure is that she was the victim of an abusive mother.  Played by Allison Janney (a sure fire Oscar nominee), this lady brings new dimensions to the term "evil stage mother" and also to the term "foul-mouthed", for that matter.  She is just an awful person, almost hard to watch, but Janney is brilliant in the role.  Harding was also victimized and abused by her husband Jeff Gillooly, played by Sebastien Stan, whose name became a verb, as in, "to Gillooly someone".  Also terrific in this movie is actor Paul Walter Hauser who plays Shawn Eckert, Gillooly's loser friend who "masterminds" the whole Kerrigan attack.

But the real star of the movie is Margot Robbie who plays Tonya Harding.

Robbie as Harding (L) and 

Harding herself (R) in competition

She plays Harding as both a victim and a victimizer.  She pulls off the skating sequences, which were brilliantly filmed, very well.  She was brilliant in this role.  Watch the changes in her eyes and her face in one scene where she applies her own make-up prior to skating.  A simply marvelous performance.

At times this movie was hard to watch, and as far as language is concerned, it is for sure hard to listen to at times, but great performances by Robbie and Janney, and a terrifically written and filmed story (directed by Craig Gillispie) make this well worth seeing.

Four stars from The Grandstander.

By the way, both Harding and Gillooly were interviewed by screenwriter Steven Rogers in preparation for this movie, so one would think that what we are seeing is authentic.  And we know for sure that Robbie and Harding were in touch with each other, at least at various red carpets in relation to the release of the movie, as evidenced below.

Harding and Robbie on the red carpet

Movie Review: "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Took myself down to see the newest Martin Scorsese / Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration, "The Wolf of Wall Street", this afternoon.  This movie could also be titled "Goodfellas Go To Wall Street" since there are many similarities to that classic Scorsese movie, including the main character's voice narration of the movie, that same character directly addressing the movie audience at points in the show, a loud and frenetic soundtrack, and an incredible amount of profanity. Oh, and then there is the unbelievable amount of drug use, and, of course, enough sexual activity and nudity to more than justify the movie's R rating.

Definitely not one you want to attend with your parents, and not one that would be a good "first date" movie, either.

All that said, did I like the movie?  Yeah, I did, because, once again, Scorsese has painted a picture of amoral - to put the best face on it - people, better than just about anyone making movies today, and DiCaprio delivers an absolutely kick-ass performance as the title character.  Really, has he ever given a bad performance in anything?  I am guessing that there will be Oscar nominations for both of them.

However, for all of the in-your-face sensory overload that this movie delivers, the very best scene in the movie, in my mind, is a quiet one on Jordan Belfort's (DiCaprio) yacht when Kyle Chandler, as the FBI agent pursuing him, meets face to face with Belfort/DiCaprio.  Great scene.

It's a great cast that includes Jonah Hill (in a Joe Pesci-type role), Rob Reiner, Matthew McConaughey, Jean Dujardin, and an absolutely gorgeous young (22 years old) actress from Australia named Margot Robbie.  Oh, and famous private eye Bo Dietl, the guy from the Arby's commercials, plays, are you ready for this?, a private eye named Bo Dietl, and he's pretty good in the part! 

Just as a treat for all you Loyal Readers, he is a picture of Ms. Robbie in a scene from the movie, and if you have already seen the movie, you know that this still picture doesn't do her or the scene in question justice!