Mali-boom Barbie
by Paul Oswell

What’s the crossover point of nuclear weapons and a famous American doll? Probably the bikini, right? 

In 1946, Europeans experienced their first summer without war in years. The air was ripe with optimism, and in France, designer Louis Réard noticed women rolling up the edges of their bathing suits to improve their tans. He created a skimpy two-piece bathing suit using a few triangles of fabric. Across the world in the south Pacific, Bikini Atoll was being used for atomic bomb tests. The islands took their name from a local word, ‘pikinni,’ meaning ‘coconut place.’ Réard thought his invention was as ‘small and devastating’ as the atom bomb, and bikinis were born. 

Oppenheimer - Chris Nolan’s biopic of the eccentric physician heading up the Manhattan Project - doesn’t concern itself with fashion, although there are some gratuitously saucy clips that go way beyond flashing midriffs (more on this). 

At three hours long, it’s something of a test of endurance, especially given the decidedly un-cinematic plethora of scenes that are mostly just men arguing in a broom cupboard. Other scenes include men arguing at parties, men arguing in congressional hearings and men arguing on trains. Oops, they accidentally-on-purpose invented a devasting weapon, and now there’s some moral qualms about using it, and the world-ending doors that its use inevitably opens. 

I found that the conflicts - Oppenheimer’s personal ones as well as the larger ethical/political picture - carried the drama well enough, and given that there’s only one ‘action’ scene (the testing of the bomb), I personally didn’t feel that it dragged.

There are some surprising revelations. Much of the first part of the movie is negotiating Oppie’s romantic tangles. He was quite the player, let me tell you. Apparently he was irresistible, and he didn’t even look like Cillian Murphy that much in real life. Still, it rounds out the character nicely. Otherwise we’d just be watching repeated heated discussions of theoretical physics.

There are some fun cameos - Tom Conti as Albert Einstein for example - and a Salieri/Mozart-type storyline with embittered scientist Lewis Strauss (Robert Downy Jr). Florence Pugh spends much of her screen time in the nude, and I’m not too sure how it advances the plot but Nolan seems to think it important. 

There’s lots of Communist hunting and intellectual jousting, and of course it’s a huge topic. In some ways, we are all living in the post-credits sequence. They also make Oppenheimer say his famous line (“Now I am become Death, etc”) twice, just for kicks. But overall, it’s a commendable achievement, imho. 

Two hours after Oppenheimer finished, I was laughing at Ryan Gosling being a plastic doll. Barbie could not be more diametrically opposed as a movie, and I’m glad we saw them both in this order. 

I am Very Much Not The Demographic for Barbie, but Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach deliver a witty, self-aware script that elevates this film way above, say, The Emoji Movie or Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Given that it’s essentially two hours of product placement, it’s a biting, near-subversive commentary on gender politics, and two-thirds of the way through, America Ferrera delivers a feminist manifesto that is genuinely rousing. I can understand why Ben Shapiro pretends to hate it for money, and that in itself is pleasing to me. 

Margot Robbie, Kate McKinnon and America Ferrara all deliver, and Ryan Gosling’s commitment to the role of Ken is impressive. Issa Rae and Michael Cera are also absolutely loving their roles. 

If you want six hours of experiencing just about every emotion that you could feel watching movies, I heartily recommend the double bill. Just be careful about the order and remember the old saying: “Oppenheimer before Barbie, you’ll still want to party; Barbie before Oppenheimer, you might have a bad time-a.”

GET YOUR ROCKS OFF: ASTEROID CITY

Every time a new Wes Anderson movie comes out, I take to Twitter and say, “I see Wes Anderson has made his film again.” It’s very funny every single time, and the post often gets up to three likes. 

Anyway, Wes Anderson has made his film again, and if you like Wes Anderson films, boy are you in for a treat. If you don’t, then boy are you in for a bad time. But cool your jets - perhaps you’re like me, someone who kind of likes Wes Anderson films, but thought that his last one, The French Dispatch, had jumped the whimsical shark and had taken Mr Anderson’s film making to its logical, pastel-drenched conclusion. 

You might, if this is you, like Asteroid City; Mr Anderson seems to be pulling back from the brink of his own stylization.

All the tropes are there: the comforting color palate, the endless list of A-list stars (notably Bill Murray-free this time), the love of analogue artifacts and affectation and steampunk-adjacent exploration, the snippy dialogue, etc. However, whereas in The French Dispatch it felt at times that the style was leading the substance, here the story takes to the foreground, and it’s all the more enjoyable for it. There’s an implied sense of artifice in most Wes Anderson films, but here the whole movie is presented as a staged production, making the artifice overt from the start. 

Brian Cranston plays ‘the announcer’ and leads us through the post-modern scenes of the writer (Ed Norton) not only creating the play that is 'Asteroid City', but also conversing with the cast (mainly Jason Schwarzman, Scarlet Johanson and Tom Hanks) as they prepare scenes. The world of ‘Asteroid City’ is self contained and coherent, but the leads walk backstage and peel back the layers, and we’re invited to look into the play’s innards. 

The plot of the play - delivered in typical Andersonian fashion - is that a group of young science geniuses have gathered in a small desert town to receive awards for innovation. While there, the assembled crowds witness an extraterrestrial event and are subsequently held captive by the military. In a charming, whimsical way, of course. Jason Schwarzman’s character also has to tell his kids that their mother (also the daughter of Tom Hanks’s character) has died. 

Annnnnd…that’s about it, with some very funny supporting roles from Steve Carell, Hope Davis and Tilda Swinton. The future-retro aesthetics of a post-war jet age are employed with humor and much less worthiness than The French Dispatch, and it’s a return to the more innocent, playful vibes of Moonrise Kingdom. 

Make no mistake, I was prepared to be annoyed by this film, but the deceit is just charming enough for it to work, and its compact running time and budget make for welcome creative restraints. I feel like Wes Anderson decided to dial things back, and Asteroid City is all the better for it. 

In the meantime, I see I’ve made the tweet about Wes Anderson making his film again again. Only this time, I’m not mad about it. (PO)

Little Beau Creep
Review: Beau Is Afraid

If you don’t already suffer from anxiety going into this movie, you may want to prepare for an immersive experience. In this epic cinematic fever dream, Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) answers the question, what if Uncut Gems was remade by Charlie Kauffman but instead of an Ethiopian opal, it’s your mother’s judgment?

The first hour is stress porn at its most visceral. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is a psychologically-delicate loser living in squalor in an unnamed city. In this movie, though, he doesn’t become Joker, he instead attempts to visit his remote but domineering mother. Increasingly horrifying developments prevent this from happening. Beau lives in an urban hellscape with dangers - many imagined but some perhaps real - that are at his throat as soon as he opens his front door. 

Set upon from the start by a tidal wave of anxiety and Cronenbergian levels of psycho-physical violence, Beau’s only solace lies in his drug-administering therapist. Even at rest, he is tortured by memories of his mother, which swing between overly-affectionate and abusive. Escaping from the incredibly choreographed unhinged venality and street terror propels us into Beau’s voyage, much of which experiences passively, tossed along on an unpredictable stream of random circumstance and hallucination. 

Aster’s own tropes are present from these early scenes, his fascination with decapitation, devils hanging from ceilings and people jumping off ledges all touched on. They appear in various guises throughout Beau’s odyssey - the foreshadowing tapestry in the opening of Midsommar is replaced by a video tape that seems to predict an inescapable future. People as puppets or painted models or characters in a play - another of Aster’s fixations - is another theme. 

Beau lands in a suburban sanctuary that becomes more sinister by the day, and then escapes to a dreamlike woodland camp, before arriving at his mother’s house for a final reckoning. The plot is really a series of increasingly surreal, horrific tableaux, each with their own stakes. What if swallowing pills without water killed you? What if you left your apartment door open and unattended in a feral neighborhood? What if every single feeling of safety that you ever felt was an illusion? It’s a series of rug pulls, with the added feeling that mother is watching at all times. 

The cast is a parade of national treasures: Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind and Patti LuPone. There are also some gasp-inducing cameos that I won’t spoil. Phoenix delivers his exasperating milquetoast of a man with impressive discipline, and in flashbacks Armen Nahapetian is excellent as young Beau, as is Zoe Lister-Jones as his mother. Kylie Rogers also stands out as the suburban couple’s chaotically unhinged teen daughter. 

It’s all here. Comedy, body horror, animation, post-modern framings, Black Mirror-esque weirdness and relentless Freudian symbolism. At three hours long, it might be a stretch for some, but the pacing, cast and sheer variety of Aster’s cinematic toolbox were compelling. You might not love all of it, but you can’t help but admire the ambition. (PO)

Beau Is Afraid is playing at the Prytania Theater Canal Place and across the city.

To the Bat Cage!
Review: Renfield

If I have any complaints about this high-octane gore fest, it’s that it could have used more Nicolas Cage. I mean, that’s my complaint with almost all movies, but here especially. We’ll get to his performance, but the upshot is an absurd vampiric romp that slashes its bloodthirsty way through New Orleans, seen through the eyes of young Renfield (a foppish Nicholas Hoult). 

Dracula (Cage) is living in the abandoned Charity Hospital after centuries of adventures with his familiar, Renfield. We’re shown some very satisfying black and white flashbacks, Cage doing his best Bela Lugosi in the flickering footage. Times are hard, though, and fighting the church’s vampire hunters has taken its toll. Dracula needs fresh victims, and in his weakened state, it’s down to Renfield to supply them. 

Our boy is experiencing a kind of class consciousness, though, relating the exploitative relationship he has, and slowly coming to the conclusion that Dracula is kind of abusive. Inspired by a support group for toxic relationship survivors and the goriest meet cute ever with a local cop Rebecca Quincy (played by Awkwafina), Renfield moves out of the derelict hospital, determined to make his own way in the world.

The subplot is a chaotic mix of police corruption within the “PDNO”, as an organized crime group flexes its muscles. The crime family is fronted by a manic son (the hilarious Ben Schwarz), doing his mother’s bidding (Shohreh Aghdashloo as the hard-nosed matriarch). 

Renfield tries to escape Dracula’s clutches as he also helps Quincy and pursues self-improvement in the group. Dracula is a tenacious boss, though, and chases Renfield down. It’s here that Cage excels, delivering a wonderfully camp portrayal, mixed with sinister undercurrents of bullying. He obviously relishes every word, and every flamboyant body movement. 

There are a couple of large fight scenes, each doused with such cartoonish amounts of blood and carnage that it’s hard to be squeamish about. People are beaten to death with another person’s limbs, heads and legs are detached and fly through the air, and it feels like the director (Chris McKay) is just seeing what he can get away with. The effects are great, Cage becoming a smoke cloud or a colony of bats as he terrorizes just about everyone. 

There are some good local jokes, it being set in New Orleans and being a great addition to the canon of NOLA media post-lockdown [see our feature on that here]. Renfield and Quincy escape a fight and need to meet to regroup and one of them yells, "Meet me at Cafe du Monde!", you know, WHERE THE LOCALS MEET. Quincy also delivers a good bit about the Sysyphian task of sobriety traffic stops in a city that has drive-through daiquiri stores. 

Is the movie ridiculous? Yes. Is the plot, even within its own universe, completely goofy? Hell yes. Would I almost immediately see it again because it was a fun time? Absolutely. I wish Dracula had a few more dramatic flourishes, but hey, I’ll stick my neck out for Renfield.  (PO)

New New Orleans Media! (feature)

Going on a hunch

​If there’s one thing that British cinema does very well, it’s genial low-stakes capers, with a slightly eccentric protagonist tilting at windmills of varying seriousness. In the last year or so, we’ve had ‘Mrs Harris Goes to Paris’, and then more recently ‘Living’, both of which were feelgood romps of this very ilk. The Lost King also sidles up to this genre, but has the distinction of being based on a recent true story, which adds to the charm.

The true story is this: In 2012, Philippa Langley, a single mother from Edinburgh, spearheaded a successful search for the hereto lost grave of King Richard III. She also sought to redeem his image, which had been so thoughtlessly trashed by one William Shakepeare and propaganda by the Tudor royal family that replaced him - the last of the Plantagenet kings.

Pop history remembers Ricky III as a cruel hunchback who locked up and murdered young princes after imprisoning them in the Tower of London, and yet beyond a cursory analysis, there is little factual historical evidence to support any of this. 

Driven by a humdrum life and a sudden vigor thanks to some new historical society chums, Langley sets about locating and digging up the lost grave, which just happened to be under a civil service car park in the city of Leicester. 

Langley is played with no little charisma by the excellent Sally Hawkins, who also communes with the dashing ghost of said King (who can only be seen by her) during her quest. Hawkins is probably most famous for being the non-aquatic love interest in The Shape of Water (for which she was Oscar nominated). There’s definitely a parasocial relationship that develops here - can Hollywood ever give Hawkins a human boyfriend again?  

Steve Coogan plays Langley’s coparenting ex husband, and though initially skeptical, he eventually becomes a supportive cog in the machine. The hunt and excavation takes on a life of its own once the probability of finding the actual body becomes more likely, and much of the movie is spent on the various public bodies that unfairly swoop in to try and claim credit for Langley’s work. 

It’s an inspiring tale of creating a new life that centers your own fulfillment, as well as good, old-fashioned tenacity. A put-upon David who takes down the Goliaths of naysaying academics. It being a true story, we know (or can easily find out about) the outcome before it happens, but it doesn’t detract from the joyous ending, and thanks to Hawkins and Coogan, it’s a satisfying retelling, and finally it’s on Langley’s terms. (PO)

The Lost King is playing at The Prytania Canal Place