VIDEO: Watch Tim review “A Star is Born” and “Venom” with Ellery McCardle on KARE 11.
“Venom” (PG-13)
Tom Hardy takes his career to dizzying new heights with “Venom,” his second comic book movie role after playing the ominous Bane in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” In “Venom” he plays Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter who gets a bit too close to the story of a corrupt scientist (Riz Ahmed) and encounters an alien substance that bonds with him and creates this monstrous alter-ego.
Directed by Reuben Fleischer (“Zombieland”), “Venom” marks the second time we’ve encountered the Marvel Comics creation on the big screen, 11 years after critics and fans blasted Topher Grace’s version in “Spider-Man 3.” Here, though, there’s no Spider-Man to be found and instead of being a villain, Venom is more of an anti-hero that audiences can get behind, mainly because the bad guy is battling an even-worse guy.
There’s no question that “Venom” is trying to capitalize on the irreverent tone of Ryan Reynolds’ “Deadpool” movies with its humor, and for the most part it works thanks to the brilliance of Hardy, who delivers yet another strikingly original performance opposite the always great Michelle Williams.
And while the film isn’t nearly as polished as his eccentric Marvel cousin and plays it safe with a PG-13 rating, “Venom” is still very entertaining and leaves the door open for more, as teased by the film’s end credits scene.
Lammometer: 7 (out of 10)
Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO Radio, WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.
There’s a lot of plot that needs to be ironed out in Disney’s new big-budget adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic 1962 children’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time,” and despite the well-intentioned efforts of director Ava DuVernay, the film struggles to find a way to come together in a cohesive manner.
Storm Reid stars as Meg Murry, the young daughter of scientists Alex and Kate Murry (Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who has clearly inherited her father’s expansive knowledge of astrophysics. Alex’s obsession, however, with the space-time continuum leads to his mysterious disappearance, plunging Meg into four-year funk that suddenly changes when three celestial beings, Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) turn up in her backyard with the promising information about the location of her father.
Accompanied by her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and friend Calvin (Levi Miller), Meg embarks with the otherworldly beings on fantastical trek that transcends the boundaries of space and time. The voyage leads them to different planets and ultimately, the dark world known as The It that is holding Alex captive, where she must use her mind to defeat evil if her father is ever to be freed.
There’s no question that “A Wrinkle in Time” is stunning piece of work from a visual standpoint, as DuVernay does her best to describe L’Engle’s intricately detailed source material. But where the visuals excel the narrative falters, where the discussion of tesseracts (“tessering” is the term they use for traveling) and quantum physics quickly becomes confused and offers no solutions to move the plot forward in meaningful and sensible way.
Instead, the film takes on bizarre if not creepy tones at times, and even without the weirdness, the film is way too cerebral for its intended kid audience (if not the adults accompanying them). The ambitious concept worked wonders for Christopher Nolan with “Interstellar,” but as for “A Wrinkle in Time,” DuVernay is lost in space.
Lammometer: 5 (out of 10)
Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO-AM, WJON-AM, 103.7-FM The Loon, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.
The 90th annual Academy Awards ceremony is Sunday, and you can bet some people will be solely tuning in to see if there will be a screw-up as monumental as last year’s Best Picture envelope fiasco. That’s unlikely, but with any luck, host Jimmy Kimmel will have fun with the faux pas all night long. The show simply needs something out of the ordinary, because with the predictability of this year’s nominations, the show, barring a couple of potential upsets, is shaping up to be another 3 1/2-hour Academy borefest.
Despite the formulas pundits put into play to make their picks, predicting the winners of the Oscars doesn’t take much homework. Basically, ignore the awards handed out by the critics and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the members of which hand out the Global Globes), because journalists don’t vote on the Oscars. Instead, the trends lie with industry awards – the Producers Guild of America, the Director’s Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television Awards – because some, but not all, are voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
With that, making this year’s picks quickly fell into place. Here are my predictions and some potential upsets.
Best Supporting Actor nominees: Willem Dafoe, “The Florida Project”; Woody Harrelson, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; Richard Jenkins, “The Shape of Water”; Christopher Plummer, “All the Money in the World”; Sam Rockwell, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”
Will win: Sam Rockwell, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”
Possible upset: Willem Dafoe, “The Florida Project”
Best Supporting Actress nominees: Mary J. Blige, “Mudbound”; Allison Janney, “I, Tonya”; Lesley Manville, “Phantom Thread”; Laurie Metcalf, “Lady Bird”; Octavia Spencer, “The Shape of Water”
Will win: Allison Janney
Possible upset: Laurie Metcalf, “Lady Bird”
Best Actor nominees: Timothée Chalamet, “Call Me by Your Name”; Daniel Day-Lewis, “Phantom Thread”; Daniel Kaluuya, “Get Out”; Gary Oldman, “Darkest Hour”; Denzel Washington, “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”
Will win: Gary Oldman, “Darkest Hour”
Possible upset: Not a chance. Oldman is due for what is easily the best performance of the year.
Best Actress nominees: Sally Hawkins, “The Shape of Water”; Frances McDormand, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; Margot Robbie, “I, Tonya”; Saoirse Ronan, “Lady Bird”; Meryl Streep, “The Post”
Will win: Frances McDormand, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”
Possible upset: Sally Hawkins, “The Shape of Water”
Best Picture nominees:
“Call Me by Your Name”; “Darkest Hour”; “Dunkirk”; “Get Out”; “Lady Bird”; “Phantom Thread”; “The Post”; “The Shape of Water”; “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”
Will win: “The Shape of Water”
Possible upset: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” The recent claims that writer-director Guillermo del Toro lifting the story from the 1969 play “Let Me Hear You Whisper” (just in time for voting!) may come back to bite “The Shape of Water.” A harbinger of that will be if Christopher Nolan upsets del Toro for Best Director. Nolan winning wouldn’t be a huge shame. Nolan is way, way overdue and deserves the honor for the expert direction on “Dunkirk.”
Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO Radio, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.
When you see a performance as stunning as Gary Oldman’s in the new biographical World War II drama “Darkest Hour,” it begs the natural question of where Oldman the actor ended and his channeling of legendary British Prime Minister Winston Churchill began. On the face of things, it’s easy to presume that Oldman’s transformation took place somewhere in the daily three and a half-hour makeup process and extra half-hour to assemble the costume; but for the master thespian, becoming Churchill to face the darkest hour in the history of Great Britain took a lot longer than people would imagine.
“It takes the better part of a year to work on the role, and that includes all of the things that you would imagine. You read the material and then go to the books and the news footage and speeches, and all of that stuff,” Oldman told me in a recent phone conversation from New York City. “What it becomes is a year of one’s life in surrendering to all things Winston. But there is only so much of the work that you can do in isolation. So, I decided that once the script was finalized and there were various changes made to the script as it evolved, that I learned it like a play. I knew it long before I got to the set so I’d just have the material inside me and wouldn’t have to think about it. It’s like the old saying, ‘It’s not how well you’ve known something, but how long you’ve known it,’ so the role was in my DNA.”
Now playing in limited release and expanding to more locations throughout the country on Friday, “Darkest Hour” chronicles a short yet remarkable time in the life of Churchill in 1940, when the legislator was suddenly escalated to the post of prime minister because of the resignation of his predecessor Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), who lost the confidence of Parliament. With little support from either side of the political aisle and perhaps most importantly, King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn), Churchill was faced with either negotiating for what it sure to become a doomed peace treaty with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, or take a stand to fight for the ideals, liberty and ultimately, the freedom of Great Britain.
Intensifying the situation, however, is that whatever tact Churchill takes, it must be accomplished in a matter or mere weeks. Nazi forces are moving across Western Europe and have 300,000 British troops surrounded with seemingly nowhere to go on the beaches of Dunkirk in France.
Written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Joe Wright, “Darkest Hour” comes at an interesting time in the state of politics in both the U.S., where the divide between liberals and conservatives is as deep as perhaps it has ever been. But there shouldn’t be a quandary for audiences rooting for Churchill — who early in his career moved from the conservatives to the liberals, only to switch back to the conservative party 26 years prior to the dire circumstances Great Britain faced in “Darkest Hour” — simply because partisanship has no place when it comes to fighting evil.
“There’s nothing either partisan or bi-partisan about going after Hitler,” Oldman said. “It’s an interesting question, though, because Churchill made himself at times unpopular, because this was a man who made mistakes in his career as we all have. He certainly made some blunders. But as far as Hitler was concerned, Churchill was almost clairvoyant.
“He caught on to Hitler very, very quickly — way back in the early ’30s,” Oldman added. “Once he got a taste of it, he came back to the UK as a backbencher. He stood up in Parliament and said, ‘We should rearm — this guy is coming after us,’ but no one would believe him, because it was unthinkable, especially after the first World War that there would be another war. Pacifism was very universal, and they wanted to repair relationships with the Germans, so what Churchill was doing was considered a little politically incorrect and scaremongering. But he stuck to it. He never wavered from it — and he was right.”
In some ways, Oldman believes Churchill was destined to be at the right place at the right time in history; all of which stemming from a singular incident in World War I that’s recounted in “Darkest Hour.”
“If one of those bullets that he talks about in the first World War, when he is quoted, ‘There is nothing more thrilling than being shot at without result,’ if one of those stray bullets would have hit him and removed him from the scenario, or if he had worn out in Parliament and capitulated, then the landscape would have looked very different,” Oldman said. “All of Western Europe would have been fascist … and while people say it, and they say it in jest, ‘If it wasn’t for Winston Churchill we’d all be speaking German,’ there’s some truth in that.”
Not surprisingly, Oldman is already a favorite for a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance as Churchill, as are Wright and the film for Best Picture and Best Director, respectively. But in coincidental bit of timing, another film about the pivotal events depicted in “Darkest Hour,” “Dunkirk — director Christopher Nolan’s spectacle about the soldiers trapped on Dunkirk Beach — is also considered an odds-on favorite for Oscar nominations.
No matter how the Oscar race shakes out, Oldman agreed with my observation that the true victor is not either “Darkest Hour” or “Dunkirk,” but history itself, as the acclaim both films are receiving essentially ensures that these life-changing historical events will never be forgotten.
“It’s interesting when we screen this film. I can forgive the Americans for not knowing the real details of what happened, but you’d be surprised to the number of people that we screened it to in Britain who don’t know this story outside of scholars and historians, and people that really follow it and look at history,” Oldman said. “It’s amazing the number of people who said, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’ So, both films present a story very much worth telling and I couldn’t have put it better: History wins on this one.”
