I appear on “CTV News at 11:30” with anchor Andria Case to talk the wild Tom Cruise movie “Digger,” the meta Apple TV+ series “Brothers” and the true crime movie “Unabomber” on Netflix.
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 12:12)
I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraidah Alman to talk about the absurdist environmental dramedy “Digger,” the suburban gothic “Verity” and the psychological thriller “Heel.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 13:15)
I join CTV Atlantic’s Bruce Frisko to talk about the absurdist environmental dramedy “Digger,” the suburban gothic “Verity” and the psychological thriller “Heel.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
CAST: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
REVIEW: A study in justification of one’s actions, “Digger” is a dark satire, touched by farce, of narrative control in the face of crisis.
Tom Cruise, disguised by an inch of aging make-up, fake teeth and an elaborate comb-over, plays Digger Rockwell, the world’s most powerful oil tycoon. Eccentric, greedy and immoral—“Mr. Rockwell is a man who would roast our children alive if he thought he could sell them for a dime,” says scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed)—he does not like bad news.
When he gets bad news about the stability of one of his oil platforms, he ignores it and the resulting explosion causes havoc, creating aa ice shelf then size of Washington, D.C. on a collision course with Western Europe. “Digger here got us into this mess,” says the President of the United States (John Goodman), “and Digger’s gonna dig us out again.”
Rather than accept blame for the worldwide chaos Digger treats the situation not as a catastrophe but as a branding problem. “Panic is a resource,” he says. “When you’re running away from a house fire no one cares who left the toaster on.”
With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Digger tries to save his company and himself by controlling the narrative. “They know the facts,” he says. “The story is yet to be told.”
Echoes of “Dr. Strangelove” reverberate throughout “Digger.” Both are absurdist nightmare comedies that skewer the egos and ideologies of powerful men, and both focus on managing the narrative of a crisis rather than dealing with it. But the cool, deadpan vibe of Stanley Kubrick’s film is replaced by a passionate, outlandish feel that will certainly divide audiences.
It’s a big movie, filled with big ideas, even if they sometimes get lost in the sheer grandiosity of the filmmaking. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who co-wrote the script with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman, presents a riff on the old saying, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but in Digger Rockwell’s world corruption goes hand in hand with control because that’s where the power is. Controlling the narrative is more important than solving the problem.
“They know the facts,” he says, “but the story has yet to be told.”
Digger’s a bad guy, ignorant, tacky and narcissistic, but he’s the hero of his own invented narrative and in an era of fake news and misinformation, it’s a timely and scary reality check.
The absurd and often jaundiced take on the machinery of power from Digger’s house to the White House and beyond is not subtle. Iñárritu takes big swings here narratively and stylistically. His ambition pays off in fits and starts. Some scenes, like a sequence of Digger, the President of the United States (John Goodman) and various generals, watching the iceberg collision with land is darkly hilarious, or Cruise’s ten-minute amphitheater monologue, fire on all cylinders.
But overall “Digger” values audacity, ambition and theatrics over narrative clarity. Not funny enough to be a satire, too outrageous to be straight drama, it lands in a tonal wasteland, wavering between silly and sincerity.
The parts of “Digger” that work, however, work very well. John Goodman lets his freak flag fly as the beleaguered POTUS and Riz Ahmed, as the pushed-to-the-brink climate scientist, hands in a career best performance. Cruise nails both the farcical elements of the character but lets the more intimate, realistic moments breathe in a performance that will likely draw attention from the Academy at Oscar time.
Digger Rockwell brags that the world is powered by his fossil fuels, but his movie is fueled by something else: audacity. It is a truly unique film, the kind that doesn’t usually feature such high-priced talent, but this audacious environmental drama is bordered self-indulgence and by times is a chore to sit through.
LOGLINE: “Kinds of Kindness,” a new, absurdist dark comedy now playing in theatres, reteams “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone, in three interconnected stories, detailing the codependency between a man and his eccentric and controlling employer, a policeman whose missing wife reappears, but isn’t the person he remembers and a woman devoted to a spiritual leader.
CAST: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
REVIEW: Director Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the Academy Award winning success of “Poor Things” with another study of the dark side of humanity. The film, “Kinds of Kindness” is a portmanteau, a triptych of tales, each featuring different stories and characters, but the same main cast. Loosely connected, each section deals with some sort of manipulation and falling under the sway of someone who may, or may not, have the best of intentions.
Those expecting a rehash of “Poor Things” or “The Favourite,” the Lanthimos films that edged the Greek director into the mainstream, will have to adjust expectations. This is a return to the, despite the movie’s title, unkind tone of earlier works like “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” The harder edge brings with it a certain kind of bleak, mean spiritedness that may be entertaining to watch, but not always exactly enjoyable to process as a viewer.
Still, Lanthimos has made a movie that is not soon forgotten.
In a landscape of movies that offer instant gratification, “Kinds of Kindness,” with its unexpected twists and often unpleasant story developments, is one that takes its time to burrow into its audience’s collective consciousness.
To say it takes some surprising zig zags is an understatement, but it’s not simply strange for the sake of being strange. There does seem to be a motive behind the madness of this co-dependency comedy, no matter how impenetrable it may be. Your enjoyment level will depend on your ability to hang on to the mast as the waters get very choppy.
Greed and murder are not new themes in the work of Martin Scorsese, but the effects of those capital sins have never been more darkly devastating than they are in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
A study in the banality of evil, the story, loosely based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, is set in 1920s Oklahoma, a time of an oil rush on land owned by the Osage Nation. The discovery of black gold made the Indigenous Nation the richest people per capita on Earth. With wealth came an influx of white interlopers, “like buzzards circling our people.”
Among them is William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a seemingly respectable Osage County power broker. He speaks the area’s Indigenous language and publicly supports the Osage community, but, as we find out, it is his insidious and deadly dealings with his Indigenous Osage neighbors that filled his bank account. “Call me King,” he says unironically.
When his nephew and World War I vet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives, looking to start a new life, Hale brings him into a years long con to defraud the Osage people through marriage scams and murder by setting up a connection between Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman, and Ernest.
“He’s not that smart,” says Mollie, “but he’s handsome. He looks like a coyote. Those blue eyes.”
Mollie sees through the overture, noting, “Coyote wants money,” during their first dinner, but despite the economic angle, the pair marry, making Ernest an heir to her fortune if something should happen to her.
That economic element lays at the dark heart of Hale’s plan. He orchestrates matches between the monied Osage mothers, sisters and daughters with carefully chosen white men, who exploit them, murder them, and siphon off the oil money from their estates.
This reign of terror claims the lives of more than two dozen Osage women, attracting the attention of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and his crew.
The murderous real-life scheme behind “Killers of the Flower Moon” is the most depraved crime and villain Scorsese has ever essayed on film.
The wholesale murder for money is driven not just by greed, but also by white supremacy, oppression of culture and a diabolical disregard for human life. It is pure evil, manipulated by Hale, played by De Niro as the smiling face of doom.
De Niro has played dastardly characters before, but he’s never been this vile. And this is an actor who played The Devil in “Angel Heart.”
The thing that makes Hale truly treacherous and morally irredeemable is the way he insinuates himself into the lives of the very people he was exploiting and having murdered. He is a master manipulator, who will shake his victim’s hand while using his other hand to stab them in the back, and De Niro’s embodiment of him is skin crawling. “This wealth should come to us,” he says, “Their time is over. It’s just going to be another tragedy.”
As Ernest, DiCaprio goes along with the plan, but, unlike his uncle, has a hint of a conscience even as he does horrible things. He’s a weak person, torn between love for his wife and his uncle’s plan to eliminate her and her family.
The center of the story is Mollie, played with quiet grace by Gladstone. Although she disappears from the screen for long periods of time, it is her presence that provides the film with much needed heart and soul. She is strong in the face of illness and betrayal, but her stoicism portrays a complexity of emotion as her family members are murdered and her own life is endangered. Mollie is as spiritual as Hale is immoral, and that balance is the film’s underpinning.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” earns its three-and-a-half hour runtime with a classically made, multiple perspective, slow burn of a crime story that sheds light on, and condemns, the brutal treatment of Indigenous people.
