THE WITCH: Toil and Trouble

Director: Robert Eggers
Writer: Robert Eggers
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson
Runtime: 92 mins
2016

I saw The Witch with a mostly full crowd. They talked, texted, and laughed through it. At the end the lights came up and people started grumbling.

"I want my money back."

"I couldn't even understand what they were saying."

"That was one of the worst movies I've ever seen."

Meanwhile my friends and I sat transfixed and slowly recovering from a soulwrenching cinematic experience. We remained shaken through dinner, and when I got home I felt uneasy turning out the lights for bed.

How could we have possibly had such a disparate experience from all the people around us?

HAIL, CAESAR!: Das Capitol

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Veronica Osorio, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill, Max Baker
Runtime: 106 mins.
2016

Hail, Caesar! is a dumb movie about dumb movies. As such, it never reaches the level of profundity of the Coen Bros.' long list of masterpieces, or even the escalating zaniness of their former comedic output like The Big Lebowski. If one were forced to rank their oeuvre, Hail, Caesar! has got to come in pretty low on the list, but the good news is that it doesn't aspire to be at the tippy top. I suspect that if seasoned filmmakers like the Coens tried to make their best-movie-ever every time they set anything to film, they would get burned out fast. Hail, Caeser! is clearly a screw around movie for everyone involved, and it ends up being a passionate and glorious one at that.

If you were to be so inclined to suggest that this movie has a plot, it would surround the activities of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a 1950's Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the aptly named Capitol Pictures up and running. He's not a creative, he just keeps the creatives functioning like cogs in a well-oiled machine. He has received an offer for a more stable job with reasonable work hours and far less stress, and this offer occupies his mind during the events of the film, which amount to a particularly trying few days for Mannix. His big movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped by a group of shady communists who call themselves The Future, the media is circling like vultures, and there are a laundry list of other on-and-off-set troubles that Mannix must aggressively manage. In the end, is the creation of Hollywood blockbuster films worth all the trouble?

EMPIRE OF THE SUN: The Sun Never Sets on the Land of the Free Rising Chinese Empire

Every other day leading up to the release of his new movie Bridge of Spies, we will be dissecting a film in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. I've picked ten movies spanning the length of Spielberg's career, five of which I have seen and five of which I haven't. This time we're looking at Empire of the Sun, a movie that I find to be criminally overlooked.

Other Reviews in this Series: Duel, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Amistad, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, Munich, Lincoln

Other Spielberg Reviews: Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Bridge of Spies

(If you haven't already, check out my new archive in the corner ---->)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Tom Stoppard
Cast: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Joe Pantoliano, Miranda Richardson, Peter Gale, Nigel Havers
Runtime: 153 mins.
1987

Empire of the Sun is a World War II film from an atypical perspective. The movie follows a young British boy named Jamie Graham (Christian Bale) who has lived in Shanghai his whole life. His father is a merchant, and his mansion is maintained by Chinese servants. He takes advantage of them, as any young boy in his social position would do. But his social position changes drastically when a Japanese military force invades Shanghai, and the streets erupt in a chaos of fleeing civilians. Jamie is separated from his parents and wanders about the city bereft, hungry, and seeking someone to take him to safety. The man he finds and latches onto is an American scoundrel named Basie (John Malkovich) who prides himself on being able to slip through the cracks of society. Unfortunately, he's not slippery enough. Basie and the freshly-christened "Jim" are deposited in a Japanese internment camp, and most of the film follows Jim as he grows up in leaps and bounds, styling himself as the caretaker of everyone in the camp. He becomes more capable than many of the depressed and defeated adults around him; he takes the blows of wartime with both a childish eagerness and a well-worn wisdom.