We slummed with cheeky writer Diablo Cody as a Valentine's Day choice and we pretty much got what we deserved. And then we rented "Oppenheimer," and it was nearly as buffoonish. We pulled the plug on both.
"Lisa Frankenstein" is the kind of mid-career film that makes you reflect on whether the author was really any good all along. We have fond memories of "Juno" and are pretty sure it would still hold up. We skipped "Jennifer's Body," whose cheeky snark this movie fails to successfully imitate; were disappointed in "Young Adult"; couldn't get into the TV show "United States of Tara"; and couldn't fully buy into "Tully," though it had its moments.
"Lisa Frankenstein" plays out as if jarred in molasses, with long beats before punch lines and just a sluggish narrative churn. (Give some of the blame to hack director Zelda Williams?) It wasn't clear that it was apparently set in 1989; I just figured Cody was suffocating us with her old hipster music references, such as a teenage girl into Bauhaus with a boyfriend sporting a Violent Femmes T-shirt (under a sport coat, of course). The execution of the story of a misunderstood teenager who reads books in a cemetery and whose dream boy, a long dead young man, comes back to life after a lightning strike is laughable but rarely funny. Carla Gugino is cringeworthy trying her hand at comedy as the stereotypical evil stepmother. Liza Soberano comes across as a rookie playing the uber-popular stepsister named Taffy. The lead, Kathryn Newton, is pretty good, at least.
None of it works. It's insulting. It could have been another smart, tongue-in-cheek teen satire, like "Bottoms," but it is the polar opposite. It's not clever; it's just a lousy movie.
Then there is "Oppenheimer," a melodramatic wank that barely rises above the level of your average soap opera. It's an opportunity to single out Christopher Nolan, too, to rethink why we thought the pre-Batman auteur was a great writer-director. (We should watch "Memento" again soon.)
This seems like an interesting story, and I bet the book (American Prometheus) is a good read, but what's on screen is a mess, spending much of its opening scenes repeatedly displaying star bursts, nuclear reactions, and glass shattering in order to replicate the fractured mind of a young genius. It jumps around in time, using the device of a catatonic older Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy laying it on thick) reciting his biography to some security commission, while parallel scenes (in black and white, for some reason) star a gaunt Robert Downey Jr. as a candidate for Commerce Secretary testifying before a Senate committee about his association years earlier with Oppenheimer.
And that's just the first 20 minutes of this three-hour monsterpiece. Maybe this was an impossible ask of Nolan, who seems overwhelmed by the vast amount of facts and players involved. Even though it feels sluggish, it also feels rushed, as if there is too much history to stuff into the film. The red-scare thread throughout the film is simplistic and repetitive. Oppenheimer and other brainiacs converse in meticulous speeches and never stoop to small talk; even cocktail banter inevitably comes around to quantum physics. I swear, as the wooden dialogue unspools endless exposition, you can hear the clack of Nolan's old-fashioned typewriter spitting out what he thinks are pearls.
Improbable events are concocted to add a modicum of zing to the leaden storytelling. I counted about 5 examples in the first half hour of characters pointing out how brilliant Oppenheimer was, usually involving his ability to speak other languages. I almost bailed out around the 20-minute mark when Oppenheimer's communist lover pauses mid-fuck, walks over to his musty bookshelf, grabs a volume written entirely in sanskrit, turns to a bookmarked page and asks Oppenheimer to interpret a random passage, and you'll never guess what the line is: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." What a perfect coincidence!
The film's sound design is also frustrating. Ambient noise drowns out dialogue. Characters whisper for no reason (for example, multiple times when two people are out in the middle of nowhere in rural New Mexico, like no one would ever do). Murphy is the biggest offender. Hamming it up as the troubled guru behind the atomic bomb, he rasps ominously like a depressed Batman villain or perhaps Nick Cave giving a spoken-word performance.
The supporting cast squirms in no-win situations. Downey looks the part but his tone is off. Emily Blunt goes from 0 to 60 as the cliched, betrayed drunk wife. Florence Pugh sits around naked as the obsessive communist lover, a cheap distraction from the nerdfest. The last straw was Matt Damon pretending to be a hard-ass general overseeing the Manhattan Project; back in the day, a performance this hilarious would be found usually in a Second City TV spoof called Bad Acting in Hollywood.
This whole concept and production is everything that is wrong with Hollywood as a cultural cog of capitalism. This is a dud of historic proportions.
BONUS TRACK
The needle drops in "Lisa Frankenstein" are clunky and distracting, and some good songs are put in danger of getting hated merely by association. Let's rehabilitate one, "Strange" by Galaxie 500:
No comments:
Post a Comment