“I don’t think they’ve invented a word for what Dali is,” says a friend of the famous Spanish surrealist painter in the new film “Daliland,” in select theatres and streaming on VOD. Indeed, he leaves behind a complicated legacy.
By the 1970s, Dali was probably the most famous living artist in the world.Treating life like one never ending carnival, he was as famous for the surrealism and symbolism in his work as he was for his celebrated up-turned moustache and public hijinks, like walking an anteater on a leash for the paparazzi.
This story begins in 1974 as the jejune James (Christopher Briney) becomes Dali’s (Ben Kingsley) assistant. The innocent, former art school student idolizes the painter, but, as he is thrust into the eccentric artist’s decadent lifestyle, he learns there is trouble in Daliland. “Sometimes It can be so hard being Dali,” says the artist.
Dali’s complex relationship with wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa) complicates both the artist’s professional and personal life. More about money than marriage, she is her husband’s mother figure and muse, but also siphons his bank accounts to fund the musical aspirations of her latest boyfriend, Jeff (Zachary Nachbar-Seckel), a singer best known for his starring role in “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
As James becomes embedded in the sideshow that has become Dali’s life, he becomes aware of the fraud and backroom deals that keep the artist’s coffers stuffed with cash.
“Daliland” isn’t so much a biography of the artist, even though there are many biographical details on display, including flashbacks to his younger life where he is played by Ezra Miller. Instead, it is a portrait of a time, of the moment when fine art became commodified and artists became marketers as well as painters. As a personality, Dali was, arguably, more famous than his work, but it was his celebrity enabled him to charge more per painting, and, ultimately dupe people into buying fakes because of the demand for his name.
Director Mary Harron paints a vivid picture of the cult of celebrity, and the price Dali paid for the quest for fame. A once revered artist, he died famous, but with a tarnished legacy. His commitment to life as the greatest form of art—the parties, the publicity stunts, the hedonism, self-mythologizing, etc—overshadowed his true gift, his ability to create truly unique artistic works. Add to that, shady business deals and money generating scams, and you have a colorful story tinged with tragedy.
Kingsley embraces Dali’s larger-than-life, “you’re in the presence of genius,” side, but never simply plays the caricature. His performance centers the outlandish story with humanity, and as the character ages, empathy for the man behind the moustache.
“Daliland” features interesting work from Sukowa as the fiery Gala and Kingsley, but does a better job at essaying the decadence of this pivotal moment in art history than providing a complete portrait of its subject.
Richard joins Jay Michaels and guest host Deb Hutton of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush to talk about the pirate who invented the Pina Colada and some movies, “Old” and the rock and roll biopic “Creation Stories,” to enjoy while sipping one of the creamy drinks.
Near the end of “Creation Stories,” the story of record industry giant Alan McGee now on VOD, a young writer promises one day to write a story that matches his ego. “That’s a very noble ambition,” he snaps back. I’m not sure if she ever wrote the story, but director Nick Moran and screenwriters Dean Cavanagh and Irvine Welsh certainly have. “Modesty gets you nowhere,” McGee says.
Ewen Bremner, best known as Spud from “Trainspotting”, plays McGee, a wannabe punk musician who put down his guitar and picked up bands like Jesus and the Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis for his UK indie label Creation Records. Told in the tried-and-true biopic form of a celebrity interview, the movie is a series of flashback vignettes of McGee that illustrate his answers. The format is old hat but allows Moran to zip through the story at a break neck speed.
The pace captures the spirit and drug fuelled joie d vivre of the times, but feels disjointed. It’s a scattershot movie that packs twenty pounds of story into a ten-pound bag. According to the movie, like a Scottish Zelig, McGee is here, there and everywhere but always in the right place at the right time. He’s front and centre in every scene, it’s his life story after all, but as we careen through McGee’s chaotic life, the side characters get lost. Particularly the musicians who made Creation so successful.
It often feels like a story, as the young writer played by Suki Waterhouse promised, that plays up to McGee’s ego courtesy of a constant stream of platitudes.
Luckily at the centre of it all is Bremner. His charismatic performance is the glue that prevents the disparate parts of the story from blowing a part. His likability holds our interest even as the story goes the way of so many other celebrity biographies—the dreaded time in rehab and/or involvement with politics. The rip-roaring stride of the film’s first half slows as “Creation Stories” searches for some elusive depth. Even then, Bremner is compelling, even if the skin-deep portrait of the music executive becomes less so as the movie nears the end credits.
“Creation Stories” is chirpily nostalgic for the heady days when Creation Records struck gold with records that resonated with millions of people. What it isn’t sentimental for is the actual music, McGee’s true legacy.
Someone you know spends far too much time playing the adventure videogame “Detective Pikachu.” The enormously popular Nintendo game is a time waster of epic proportions, eating up minutes faster than old school Pac Man gobbling up Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. Now a live action movie, “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” starring Ryan Reynolds as the title character, a little yellow rodent-like creature with soulful eyes, vies for your time at the movies.
Set on the day-glo neon streets of Ryme City, “a celebration of the harmony between humans and Pokémon,” the movie begins with the disappearance of police detective Harry Goodman at the hands of a ruthless Pokémon.
Looking to get to the bottom of the case Harry’s insurance salesman son Tim (Justice Smith) joins with his dad’s Pokémon partner, the wise-cracking but amnesiac Detective Pikachu (Reynolds). The two have a connection that goes beyond words… sort of. Only Tim can understand what the little pocket monster is saying. “People try and talk to me all the time and all they can hear is ‘Pike, pika.’” They’re a natural fit. One can talk to humans, the other to Pokémon. “If you want to find your Pops we’re gonna need each other.” With the aid of investigative journalist Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton) they uncover a criminal conspiracy that threatens Ryme City’s human/ Pokémon harmony.
The worldwide popularity of Pokémon pretty much guarantees an audience for “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who hasn’t spent hours whiling away the time with the game to enjoy this as much as already established fans. It is probably the cutest crime noir film ever made but it’s also a slog that should be a lot more fun. Not even Reynolds’s trademarked way with a one-liner can liven up this convoluted script.
“Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” feels like a retro kid’s flick. Echoes of “Gremlins,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and even “Howard the Duck” reverberate throughout, but with an emphasis on spectacle rather than charm and story.
You can’t say you weren’t warned. “Assassination Nation,” the new film from writer-director Sam Levinson, comes complete with a long list of trigger warnings. Fragile Male Egos. Torture. Swearing. The list goes on. All, and more, are contained within this lurid look at life in a small town vexed by a computer hacker.
When Salem, Massachusetts high school seniors Lily (Odessa Young), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Bex (Hari Nef) and Em (Abra) aren’t in class they spend their time partying, chasing boys, sexting and sending thousands of Facebook, Instagram and twitter posts. When a computer hacker reveals the sexual peccadilloes of their town’s mayor and school principal it wakes up the sleepy suburb’s townsfolk. When the hacking continues, uncovering Lily’s cyber affair with an older man, and the deepest darkest secrets of many others, the town’s men band together to find the hacker. “The media is complicit,” they say. “People are laughing at us. We can no longer be helpless. If the government can’t save our law and order, we will do it ourselves!”
Most every hot button woes of modern life are either literally or metaphorically covered in “Assassination Nation.” Toxic masculinity, privacy concerns, desensitization to violence, mob rule, homophobia and racism for a start. It’s a Pandora’s Box of social ills, told through the prism of a satire that feels both exploitative and timely.
As the story goes on, shifting from edgy teen sex comedy to a manifesto of female empowerment it echoes back to the events of 300 years previous when rumours led to the demise of twenty of the town’s women. Blamed for their sexuality and treated as objects, the four women at the center of the story react against the righteousness and hypocrisy they say has become their town’s sickness.
“Assassination Nation” is in-your-face stuff, a movie that is part slasher flick, part call for revolution. “You may kill us,” says Lily after all hell has broken loose, “but you can’t kill us all.” It’s not always pleasant but it is never less than interesting.
If the word ‘lurid’ didn’t already appear on page 489 of my Oxford English Dictionary it might have been coined to describe “The Bad Batch,” a new slice of misery from director Ana Lily Amirpour. This dystopian cannibal freak out isn’t really very good but if Amirpour’s intention was to make an unpleasant, slackly paced look at life after a calamity, she has succeeded spectacularly.
Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is part of the Bad Batch, a large group of murderers, drug dealers and other deplorables no longer wanted in the United States. In Amirpour’s post apocalyptic world the unwanted are numbered, tattooed, escorted to a wasteland in Texas and dropped off outside of an electric fence to fend for themselves. Arlen’s new, dusty world is a wasteland, a dangerous place where Keanu Reeves is a Jim Jones figure called The Dream and if you’re not careful you might end up as a main course for the cannibals who now eat humans to survive.
Soon she is kidnapped, carved up, her arm and leg becoming an entrée for vicious flesh eaters who keep her in chains until she escapes with the help of a gnarly old hermit played by Jim Carrey. She lands at Comfort, the ironically named compound run by cult leader The Dream. On the outskirts of Comfort Arlen exacts revenge on one of the cannibals who turned her into a midday snack. Grabbing the woman’s child she returns to the compound. When the little girl disappears her father, the mountainous and muscly Miami Man (Jason Momoa), comes looking for her. Arlene, high on acid, meets him and the two form an unlikely bond as they search for his daughter.
Amirpour is a gifted director—her “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is like no other vampire movie—but her ideas here echo a little too loudly with reverberations from “Mad Max” and other dystopian movies. “The Bad Batch” starts strong with startling images but every time it works up a head of steam it veers off track. Its languid pace and stretched-out story makes the two-hour running time feel much longer.
