Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) along with his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) gain much power, and use it for Controversial Reasons.
Doug says...
Ooh this is an interesting one. It’s not actually very good but it has flashes of real brilliance. I don’t know therefore what my overall feeling about it is. The first half showing Dick Cheney’s rise to power isn’t that interesting, and the film really picks up in the second half when it starts dealing with the subject that director Adam McKay is actually interested in: Iraq. It presents a very solid argument for the invasion and occupation of Iraq actually having nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever, and it leaves you darkly wondering.
This film is really interesting though for its more meta moments. In one scene Cheney and his wife Lynne speak in Shakespearean couplets, plotting their future. In another, Cheney turns directly to camera and delivers a monologue. It feels like McKay has read or seen Joan Littlewood (Oh! What A Lovely War! etc)’s work, because moments like the scene in which a waiter reads Cheney and his friends the menu - only the options are how to bend laws to torture and detain - are utter genius. It’s cold, clever and cinematic. Littlewood would be proud.
Overall it’s messy, and McKay shoves in weird frantic montages of clips that are sporadic in how well they hit home. Adams is woefully underused, and Bale (much as I dislike his arrogant style of acting) is brilliant; delivering emotionless epithets with a toad-like disposition. Not a great film, but some great flashes of how cinema can go beyond the naturalistic. Also fun to see Steve Carell playing Brick from Anchorman, but as a politician.
Paul says...
Political biopics don’t come much more unconventional than this. Cheney’s rise to power is told through jumps back and forth in time so quick you don’t see them coming; clever touches of meta-theatre to illuminate the comedic element of some of these events; and montages of seemingly unconnected but deeply symbolic images.
Bale drives the film and completely transforms physically and otherwise. I think he’s a shoo-in for Best Actor for two reasons. Firstly, he shows his ultimate versatility by playing someone decades older and considerably more overweight than he. Secondly, as Gary Oldman proved last year, the Oscars formula tends to go: expensive prosthetics + passable imitation = ALL THE AWARDS! I’m also glad that Amy Adams has a nomination too. I’m a huge fan of her work and here she plays the stalwart Republican wife with surprising sympathy for someone with quite snobbish views.
All in all, this is an interesting film, providing insight into, and, quite frankly, a full-blown attack upon the Bush administration and its polarising invasion of Iraq. But the aforementioned use of montages, cutaways, and meta-scenes become so frequent that they become cumbersome, and render the film fragmentary, chaotic and often confusing. I get that this is Adam McKay’s style, but such things have been done with much better effect in The Social Network and, as Doug has mentioned, Oh! What A Lovely War.
Mark: 5/10
A Star Is Born plot intro
Alcoholic international rock star Jackson (Bradley Cooper) falls in love with wannabe singer-songwriter Ally (Lady Gaga) and they sing and argue a lot.
Doug says...
This was utter codswallop. The songs aren’t particularly noticeable, Gaga and Cooper deliver purely serviceable performances that never reach excellence. The plot is hackneyed and the ending cliched. I am shocked that this got nominated while If Beale Street Could Talk didn’t get a look in. I spent most of my time waiting for it to finish, and when it did, I felt the same dissatisfaction as I did at the end of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 4. Vapid, dull and self-important.
Don’t watch this. Instead go see If Beale Street Could Talk. This is a beautifully delivered film with moments of comedy, tragedy and the reality of being a non-white person in the world. The story of Tish and Fonny is told with empathy and love, and director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) shows the moments of elation, such as when they house-hunt together, directly contrasted against the moments of menace - particularly any involving the terrifying rat-like Officer Bell. Every shot of this film is a masterpiece, while the two leads deserve (and did not receive) nominations for their roles. Why the hell this film has been overlooked by the Academy is beyond me. It should have been nominated - and it should have won.
Regarding Star is Born - our friend Luke reviewed this (you can watch it here) and received hate for his fair (and in my opinion: generous) appraisal of Gaga. One wonders if the Academy too fear the twitter onslaught from Little Monsters blinded to what excellence actually is by their subservient love for Gaga. Yes she’s a wonderful singer. But KiKi Layne or Olivia Colman, she is not. No.
Paul says...
I’ve heard such polarising views of A Star Is Born, ranging from people sobbing at the end through to utter disdain, that I’ve been looking forward to seeing what I think of it. I must admit I fall into the latter category- though not to the same extent as Doug, perhaps.
Cooper and Gaga are fine if not Oscar-worthy. There are glimmers of excellence, such as Cooper’s emotional scenes in rehab making amends for his alcohol-charged misdeeds, and a lovely performance of 'La Vie En Rose' by Gaga at the beginning.
But the huge, HUGE problem with this film is that, in terms of story-telling, it’s atrocious. Ally’s sky-rocketing career moves from singing in front of a live audience, to recording her first album, to her face on a billboard, to winning a Grammy, but with absolutely no flow between these benchmarks. Like a badly-written soap opera, one moment she sings a song and the next, she’s famous and everyone loves her! Also, Jackson’s alcoholism jumps wildly from staggering around and being a bit embarrassing, to going to rehab, to suicidal notions, with no examination of what has driven him to addiction or the mental health issues intertwined with it. Everything happens with such suddenness with very forgettable dialogue scenes in between that it just meanders from dramatic scene to dramatic scene but with no moment to captivate its audience.
Even Gaga’s lovely singing couldn’t save it for me. The film needed much more focus, much more emphasis on plot and character development in between its most dramatic moments and, dare I say it, a more memorable soundtrack.
Mark: 3/10
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