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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 24 January 2017

After years of underrepresentation on screen, the plight of black actors and filmmakers became international news at the time of last year’s Academy Awards.  The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag helped inform the public that for the second consecutive year, not a single black actor had filled one of the 20 nominations spots available in the acting categories.  On top of that, a black director had never won in 88 years of Oscars’ history.

The public outcry created almost immediate change.  The Academy announced that they were “going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up.”  Their goal was to double the number of women and diverse members within the Academy by 2020.  Whilst well-intentioned, the decision raised a fresh batch of questions.  Were black actors and filmmakers not being recognised because the existing membership was racist?  That could easily be inferred.

Such controversy will be largely avoided this year.  While the scales are not yet balanced, African American films and performances are major players in the 2016-17 awards season.  Directed by Denzel Washington, Fences is based on the Tony Award winning play and will see Viola Davis win an Oscar for best supporting actress.  Hidden Figures is about the suppression of African-American women working for NASA in the 1960s and topped the U.S. box-office in its week of release.  Set in the same decade, Loving stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as a couple looking to overturn archaic laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

As good as all of those movies are, the one most supported by critics is Moonlight.  It took home the Golden Globe for best motion picture (drama), it won a plethora of critics’ awards, and it has comfortably featured on more critics’ “top 10 lists” than any other movie in 2016 (according to Metacritic).  The buzz has been strong since it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in early September.

The story is based on a work from African American playwright Tarrel Alvin McCraney.  It was a semi-autobiographical piece written back in 2003 (when just 23 years of age) as part of an application to get into graduate school.  It was never published and never performed.  Budding director Barry Jenkins came across the work by chance and felt it had the makings of a great movie.  His judgement was spot on.

A small comparison could be made with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood – a film spread across 12 years that chronicled the upbringing of a boy from Texas.  It was a brilliant drama that tapped into the emotional journey one takes in becoming an adult.  Moonlight has similar themes and is equally broad in terms of its timeframe but the approach is noticeably different.

Jenkins’ film follows a kid named Chiron who is from a poor, troubled neighbourhood in Miami, Florida.  It is split into three segments with each providing a glimpse of Chiron’s at key points in his life.  In the opening chapter, he’s a quiet boy (Hibbert) who is bullied at school by his classmates and is neglected at home by his drug-addict mother (Harris).  In the middle act, he’s an introverted teenager (Sanders) who is battling his sexual orientation.  In the final part, he’s a buff, twenty-something year-old drug dealer (Rhodes) looking to distance himself from his past and the poverty line.

This is a remarkably good movie about one man trying to find love and his place in the world.  It’s made all the better by the heartbreaking performances delivered by the three leading actors and the outstanding supporting cast.  It’s heavy, dark and depressing but many will appreciate and/or relate to the situation.  It all leads up to a powerful final scene where the emotion truly hits home.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 08 January 2017

There was a time when Will Smith was the most “bankable” star in Hollywood.  Between 1996 and 2012, he starred in 13 films that grossed more than $100 million in the United States.  He could do action (Independence Day), comedy (Hitch), animation (Shark Tale) and heart-warming drama (The Pursuit of Happyness).

High hopes were held for his latest outing, Collateral Beauty, but they quickly dissipated when the film was released in the U.S. last week.  The box-office was poor and the reviews were even worse.  The blame was being passed around and it started an online debate about whether the “schoolyard assault” from nasty critics helped sink the film’s fate.

For the record, I don’t think critics have a major impact.  Will Smith’s last effort, Suicide Squad, has just a 26% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.4 out of 10 score on the Internet Movie Database (not good).  It didn’t stop the film from making close to $750 million internationally.  The biggest driver of a film’s financial success is marketing.  There’s been plenty of advertising for Collateral Beauty – perhaps audiences have been given a taste and simply aren’t interested?

I’d love to tell you this is a remarkable film that everyone must see.  I’m sorry, I can’t.  It’s a strange outing from director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) that left a bad taste in my mouth.  Howard (Smith) is an owner and manager of a successful advertising company based in New York City.  Tragically, his whole world was upended when his 6-year-old daughter passed away.

Two years have passed since that date and he now walks around like a mindless zombie.  He won’t speak to any clients or any staff.  He shuts himself away in his office and builds pointless domino displays (the latest took 5 days).  He’s no different away from the office either.  He’s split from his wife, he lives alone, and he rides his bike into oncoming traffic like he has a death wish.

The co-owners of the business (Norton, Smith and Winslet) have reached a breaking point.  They’re about to lose another major client and it won’t be long before their hard work is lost and their shares will be worth nothing.  A competitor has made a generous cash offer to buy the company but Howard refuses to listen let alone negotiate.  Despite everyone else being keen on the sale, it cannot proceed without Howard’s approval given he is the majority shareholder.

So what would you do in this situation?  This is where the screenplay of Allan Loeb (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) derails.  The co-owners hire a private investigator (Dowd) to follow Howard and they learn he’s been writing therapeutic letters to Death, Time and Love.  They believe this demonstrates that Howard is not of sound mind and he should therefore not be allowed, under law, to stop the company sale.

It gets worse though.  They then employ three actors (Mirren, Latimore and Knightley) to play Death, Time and Love.  Each will approach Howard in the street and get him to think that he’s talking to some kind of apparition.  All of it will be filmed by the private detective on her iPhone and will be used as evidence should the case go before a judge.  With friends like these, who needs enemies, right?

This is a contrived storyline that comes across as mean-spirited.  The idea of using paid actors as “therapy ghosts” is intriguing the motivations of the co-owners are incredibly misguided.  The film then has the audacity to suggest they’re doing the right thing!  There are several subplots designed to make us feel empathy for the co-owners that are unrealistic and manipulative.

The only parts of the film that comes across as sincere are handful of scenes where Howard slowly opens up to the leader (Harris) of a self-help group who is trying to help him through the grieving process.  That said, she lost me when explaining the concept of “collateral beauty”.  It epitomised so much of the movie in that I couldn’t buy what it was trying to sell.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 14 January 2017

At last year’s Academy Awards, Mad Max: Fury Road broke a 14 year drought and became the first Australian film to be nominated for best picture since Moulin Rouge!  Perhaps the floodgates have opened.  There’s been strong hype for Lion since it took runner-up honours (behind La La Land) at the Toronto Film Festival in September.  It has since picked up 4 Golden Globe nominations and appeared on numerous “best of the year” lists.

This is a true story and it’s also a very emotional story.  When we first meet Saroo (Pawar), the year is 1986 and he’s a 5-year-old boy living with his mother (Bose) and older brother in a Khandwa, India.  Like so many around them, they’re a poor family struggling to make ends meet.  This is best illustrated by a scene where Saroo steals coal from a nearby construction site which he then trades in the marketplace for a small bottle of milk (a luxury item to him).

Saroo’s life is forever changed when he falls asleep on an empty train parked at the local station.  He was there waiting for his brother to return from a short trip.  On waking up, Saroo finds the train is locked, empty and moving at high speed.  He screams for help but the driver can’t hear him over the sounds of the rattling carriages.  Two days pass before the train finally comes to a halt in Calcutta, close to 1,500km away, and he is able to escape.

It’s a pretty bleak scenario for Saroo.  He’s a 5-year-old with no sense of geography who doesn’t know the name of his town and doesn’t know how to find a way home.  He is preyed upon by people smugglers and the police offer next-to-no assistance.  He ultimately ends up in an orphanage from which he is sent to a couple in Hobart, Australia (played by David Wenham and Nicole Kidman) who are looking to adopt a child.

This is a film of two distinct parts.  The first half chronicles Saroo’s early life in India and his upbringing in Australia.  The second half follows the older, twenty-something-year-old Saroo (now played by Dev Patel) as he reflects upon his past and his identity.  While he’s had a great, loving upbringing in Australia, he yearns to track down his biological family.  What seemed impossible two decades ago may now be distinctly possible with websites like Google Earth acting as a guide.

It’s hard not to feel a tingle down your spine as the film’s reaches its climax.  My eyes were moist and I wasn’t the only one in the audience with that same reaction.  It’s an impressive debut feature from Australian director Garth Davis who has made a career up until this point specialising in television commercials. I strongly suspect those days are behind him as Lion proves that he can take a great story and translate it into a great movie.  Also deserving praise is writer Luke Davies (Candy, Life) who adapted Saroo Brierley’s autobiographical novel in creating the screenplay.

8-year-old Sunny Pawar will melt hearts with his performance as the young Saroo.  A small team scoured schools across India and auditioned roughly 2,000 children.  It’s easy to see why Pawar got the nod given he’s so natural on screen.  Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) is also superb as the older Saroo.  He character internalises his problems but Patel still lets us see through into his tortured soul.

A few elements are slightly undone such as Saroo’s troubled relationship with his adopted brother (which could be a whole other film).  Still, this is a powerful true story about one man’s never ending search for answers.

You can read my interview with director Garth Davis by clicking here.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 04 January 2017

Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life is a chaotic family comedy that tries to win audiences over with its silliness but fails miserably.  It begins with the unfortunately named Rafe Khatchadorian (Gluck) starting at a new school in the middle of semester.  He’s been kicked out of two other schools in the past year (we’re not told why) and this is the only one willing to take him on (which doesn’t make sense given its top academic ranking).

You might think this is a complex drama about a troubled kid trying to make new friends (like last week’s The Edge of Seventeen) but instead, we see from the outset that it’s got a screwball Saved by the Bell kind of feel.  When Rafe meets the Principal Dwight (Daly) on the first day, he learns that the school is run like a prison.  Students walk up and down the corridors in single file and aren’t even allowed to talk to each other.  It’s one of more than 100 rules that form part of a strict “rule book” that all kids must learn and abide by.

The film comes with the standard sort of subplots you might expect.  Rafe sits in front of a bully in his homeroom who kicks his desk repeatedly and threatens to give him a terrible “wedgie”.  He falls in love with a smart, introverted girl who leads an AV Club (she’s the only member) and is running for Student President.  She has no chance because the other candidate is male with a rich dad and a “hot” mum – a fact which is bizarrely endorsed by the now sexist Principal Dwight (giving us another reason to hate him).

Rafe also has trouble at home.  His single mother (Graham) is dating an absolute big of a human.  Again, there’s no nuance to these characters – they’re either wonderfully good or wonderfully bad.  This guy hates the children so much that he’s concocted a plan to send Rafe to a military boarding school so that he can spend more time with himself and with his cars.

It sounds rather depressing but Rafe finds comfort in a new life as a vigilante.  After Principal Dwight burns his precious art notebook, he teams up with his new best friend (Barbusca) and orchestrates a number of Home Alone-like pranks to “take on the establishment” and embarrass Principal Dwight.  This includes putting coloured post-it notes throughout the school and spraying graffiti on the outside walls.

Most of the pranks are too far-fetched to take seriously.  The worst involves Rafe putting paint in the roof fire extinguishers and then setting off the alarm.  A mix of paint and water rains down upon the students who are now wearing coloured shirts (against the rules) and promptly break into an elaborate dance routine!

The film’s most puzzling element is the way in introduces a darker twist (you’ll know what it is when you see it).  This in itself could have let to something much more interesting but like so many of the storylines, it’s brushed aside in the space of a few minutes so that we can return to the zany comedy.  Perhaps I’m part of the wrong demographic but it’s certainly not what I wanted.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 11 January 2017

The wife of the U.S. President, commonly referred to as the First Lady, has been depicted on screen numerous times.  Joan Allen earned an Oscar nomination for playing Pat Nixon (Nixon, 1995) and Sally Field received the same recognition for her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln (Lincoln, 2012).  Laura Linney took home an Emmy Award for her performance of Abigail Adams in the HBO mini-series John Adams (released in 2008).

The catch with all of those films is that the President was the focus and the First Lady was merely a supporting character, albeit an important one.  Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (The Maze Runner) bucks that trend with Jackie.  This is a film devotedly solely to Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of John F. Kennedy, and there are only a handful of scenes where she doesn’t appear.

For those interested in modern history and the U.S. Presidency, the film offers insight into what went on behind the scenes in the days following Kennedy’s assassination.  Jackie found herself planning a funeral and selecting a burial site for her husband.  It was made even more difficult by the close scrutiny of the hungry media, fellow politicians and advisors, and a curious public.

On top of all of that, Jackie had to prepare to vacate the White House.  President Lyndon Johnson (played by John Carroll Lynch) was sworn in two hours after Kennedy’s death and Jackie quickly learns that “a First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases”.  You wouldn’t describe her as “homeless” but didn’t have a lot of options when moving out on short notice.

There’s a deeper layer to Jackie that explores the concept of “legacy”.  What is important – what you do or how you are remembered?  Many people live rich, intricate lives but how they are forever known can come down to a single act.  Abraham Lincoln is regarded as one of the greatest Presidents in U.S. history for helping guide America through the Civil War in the 1860s.  If asking people on the street about Lincoln’s other achievements, you will undoubtedly get a few blank looks.

Jackie saw herself as the custodian of her husband’s legacy after his death and wanted him regarded as one of the great Presidents.  Speaking to a journalist for Time Magazine (Crudup), Jackie firmly notes that the not-so-nice things she says about her husband are “off the record” and not to be published.  You also sense her disappointment that as incoming President, Lyndon Johnson would now receive credit for many initiatives spearheaded by her husband.

Directed by Chilean Pablo Larraín (No), most of the film takes place in November 1963 but there are flashbacks to provide perspective.  The most significant is a sequence, included at Larraín’s suggestion, where Jackie provides the first ever televised tour of the White House.  It allows us to see two sides to Jackie.  In front of the camera, she’s poised and prepared.  Off camera, she’s a little nervous and self-aware.

Natalie Portman (Black Swan) delivers a beautiful performance and it’s easy to see why she’s one of this year’s Oscar frontrunners in the best actress category.  Portman skilfully mimics Jackie’s mannerisms but more importantly, you understand her character’s complexities.  The soft film score and lack of dialogue give parts of the film a hypnotic feel.

So how much of what we see on a screen is accurate?  Larraín and Oppenheim researched the subject thoroughly but given it offers such a deep, personal insight into Jackie (she’s alone in many scenes), there is always going to be an element of subjectivity.  I love the irony of this.  Jackie was controlling and had a particular “image” she wished to portray.  Now that she’s gone and many decades have passed, a new generation can look back and form their own view.  Films like this will help shape them.