[Disclaimer: I’m not paid to see these movies, and I’m not paid for these reviews.  They only represent my opinion about what I’ve seen on the silver screen.  Use these reviews as an independent and objective source for your movie-viewing activities.  You might disagree with me—if so, comment.]

Birdman.  From what I’ve read and heard outside the theater, people either love this movie or hate it.  I’m in the second camp.  It’s an awful movie where talented people overact, both in the play within the movie, and in their “real lives.”  It’s ironic that Michael Keaton, the first Batman, plays a washed-up movie superhero trying to make a big splash on Broadway.  His rampage in the dressing room reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor’s overacting in Virginia Woolf.  The only saving grace is Lindsay Duncan, as scurrilous Broadway critic Tabitha (great name for a witch, right?), who reminded me why I hate most critics who exemplify this twist on the teaching adage, “Those who can act, do so; those who can’t, offer scathing and unfair critiques, usually with zero content and obvious bias.”  (I guess I’m the latter too, but I don’t get paid for being acerbic.)   She does manage to say something positive, though; to say more about when and how would be a spoiler.  Don’t waste your money on this one, though: F–.

My Fair Lady.  I can almost see the eyebrows rising.  I commented somewhere (my blog maybe?) that this play and West Side Story are the Broadway musicals I measure all Broadway musical plays by.  So I jumped at the chance to watch the Hollywood movie version yet again, even though I have it on VHS somewhere in my man cave (probably brittle with age by now, but I still have a VHS tape player).  It was listed by the NY Times last Saturday as the top thing to watch, so I went to TCM (TMC?  I can’t keep all the cable acronyms straight anymore) and watched.  I then reflected on the Times blurb (to be fair, maybe provided by TCM?).  The tone in that blurb started rankling me.  There were too many kudos for Warner Brothers Studios, how great the movie was (true), and what a great service the studio, producer, and director performed in bringing the great Broadway show to the silver screen (mixed bag).

Sure, the blurb was short, but it was also biased, missing the important back story.  For some reason, the head honcho at the studios was enthralled with Breakfast at Tiffany’s darling Audrey Hepburn, who couldn’t sing a blessed note and lip-synched (so obvious on my HD TV screen), that he passed over the Broadway star Julie Andrews.  That’s not unusual in Hollywood (consider the Hollywood version of Les Miz), but the Warner Brothers’ cast included almost all the Broadway originals, including Rex Harrison.  Needless to say, neither TCM nor the Times commented on this controversy.  I felt it was my duty to remind everyone.  Audrey Hepburn might have been many things, but she was no Julie Andrews.  ‘Nough said.  For the film, though, still A++.

The Theory of Everything.  If you want to see a schlocky romance, nearly a Love Story in reverse, go see this movie.  It has a bit more to it than Love Story (the angst of a brilliant mind imprisoned in a failing body is well portrayed, for example).  The actor playing Stephen Hawking, Eddie Redmayne, is a newcomer.  He does an excellent job, a My Left Foot performance, and deserves to receive an Oscar nomination, but he portrays Hawking in a complimentary fashion, bending the truth a wee bit (nothing new for Hollywood).  He makes the iconic scientist seem more human, though.  As an example, I mentioned Kip Thorne before (the cosmologist consultant for Interstellar); he makes a hidden cameo appearance here that’s hilarious—look for it.

But the story told here is Hawking’s ex-wife’s; there’s a schlocky book by her lurking around in the background somewhere (a review on Slate.com states that the movie follows Jane’s book fairly well).  And there’s only a hint of the important theoretical research published after the divorce with Jane.  If you want to read a good book where the famous scientist’s fantastic mind is better featured, try one of Hawking’s popular science books, starting with A Brief History of Time or the one the movie steals its title from.  If you want to read about some more recent theories, try some of the research papers written with James Hartle about the unification of quantum theory with general relativity, still a vexing problem.  The movie’s a mixed bag; maybe something for everyone, but not much for anyone?  A good date movie maybe?  My grade: C-.

The Imitation Game.  It’s always nice to end on a positive note.  Whereas the last movie is about a genius’ wife, this one is about the genius.  Nasty and patriotic British POLITICS also play a starring role in this story about the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who is one of the fathers of modern computing.  The patriotic part is related to breaking the Nazi’s Enigma code during World War II.  The nasty part is about how the Brits treated homosexuals back then.  We had our Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunts; they had homophobic policies and chemical sterilization programs.  Oscar Wilde and Turing were but two of that British pogrom’s famous victims.  The Queen’s posthumous pardon, occurring not long ago, ignores all the less famous souls who suffered because of the Brit’s homophobia.  (To be fair, their policy was official and open to public scrutiny; in the U.S., homophobia, still rampant, has always been stealthy and lurking in the shadows.)

The title, by the way, has little to do with the movie.  It refers to Turing’s dissertation title about the quality of artificial intelligence, i.e. whether you can discriminate between a computer and a human being—it was Turing’s entry card into the Enigma effort, under security wraps by the Brits for fifty years, at least, according to the movie.  This might indicate also indicate some fiddling with history, something Hollywood is prone to do.  For example, Turing’s version of the code-breaking “Polish bomb” really was a machine, more a super calculator with logical variants, not a computer in the modern sense.  That didn’t stop Von Neumann from acknowledging Turing’s contributions to the theory of computing.  Another Hollywood twist is Turing’s interrogation by the detective; there’s no way Turing would tell war secrets to a lowly detective, even in an attempt to save his hide.  That scene belittles the mathematician.

Whereas Birdman wastes a cast of good actors and The Theory of Everything has only one up-and-coming star, this movie has a great cast that does a great job, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch (what a great British name!) as Turing and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, who, at this moment, are nominated in the Golden Globe’s best actor and supporting actress categories (Eddie Redmayne, from the Theory of Everything, is also nominated as best actor—a shame they’re pitted against each other).  Cumberbatch is one of my favorite actors now.  I hope to see more of him in the future.  I also loved the MI6 agent, always lurking in the shadows, so un-Bond like and therefore more realistic.  He had the balls to counter an admiral and keep a Soviet spy in operation in order to feed lies to Moscow, an objective lesson why military leaders should never be allowed to head up top secret defense projects.

Knightley finally does justice to a role…or maybe finds a role that does her justice?  She makes Joan into an important person in Turing’s life, something I can’t confirm and suspect of being a sleight-of-hand for Hollywood to minimize Turing’s sexuality.  For some reason, Knightley was pigeon-holed as a kick-ass femme fatale (Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, King Arthur, and so forth), but began to get my attention again in the lame Begin Again, a movie effectively destroyed by Mark Ruffalo.  She’s been in many movies, though, so I probably don’t have a fair sample.  This one’s a good one, though—cast, plot, and cinematic style.  Recommended: A++.

[Note: As a bow to year-end holiday festivities, I’ll take a week off from blog posts.  Normal posting will continue of December 30.  Have a safe and enjoyable holiday season!]

And so it goes….

 

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2014 at 4:00 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.