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Archive for the ‘Emma Stone’ Category

Battle Of The Sexes

22 Oct

Battle Of The Sexes – directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Farris. Sports Biopic Dramedy. 121 minutes Color 2017.

The Story: 55-year-old former tennis champion challenges 29-year–old current champion, Billie Jean King to a tennis men-against-women circus in the Astrodome, while, off-court, their marriages quake.
★★★

Stop making those faces, Emma Stone! You keep working your mouth in that odd way. Thrusting out your chin. Doing something with your jaw. Your mouth muscles. None of it means anything, it’s just fill.

And fill is needed for this badly written, shot, and directed film. The token tears are followed by the token kisses are followed by the token “meaning” of it all, and everything accompanied by the token music.

The story of King’s emerging lesbianism is not interesting because it cannot be filmed, although, once it is released it is interesting to see that she is as aggressive on the couch as she is on the court. The story of Bobby Riggs’ marriage, as one threatened by his addiction to gambling, is also not interesting, even though his wife is played by the wonderful Elizabeth Shue.

Riggs is an effective fool. And the tennis circus when it appears, is astonishing. King rides into it, like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, on a float born aloft by half nude men! Riggs must have made a mint from the show. I hope King did too.

Probably no character-lead actor going could have played Riggs at all or as well as Steve Carrell. He has to mouth a lousy script and endorse the parochial aesthetic of the directors, but there he is and you never question him.

What you question is that neither star plays tennis. They’re dubbed. As in the dumb Black Swan, their heads top off guillotined bodies like cherries on sundaes. The match is shot with Riggs’ back to the camera (and it isn’t Carrell), and King facing it (and it isn’t Stone), but Stone suffers worse because the distance carefully keeps her face out of focus, so you know it’s fake.

The marriages were fake. Their stories were real. The Riggs/King meet was real. The film’s a fake.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Emma Stone, Steve Carrell

 

La La Land

17 Dec

La La Land – directed and written by Damien Chazelle. Musical Dramedy 128 minutes Color 2016

★★★★★

The Story: A to-be actress and a to-be jazz pianist strive for their callings and their love for one another, both in the big-time.

~

How joyful it is to have a good old fashioned Hollywood musical to top off the Holidays, not the cherry on the sundae, but the sundae itself!

It may be observed that Ryan Gosling is more of a dancer than Emma Stone is and that Emma Stone is more of a singer than Ryan Gosling is, but put them both together and they spell why bother. They’re easy, they’re difficult, we want them to work it out. And will they?

As they go about their business in Los Angeles, where she is a barista on the Warner’s lot, and he is tinkling out dread pop tunes under the baleful gaze of J.T. Simmons, the piano bar restaurant owner, we are treated to massed production numbers played out around swimming pools and on the tops of stalled rush hour cars.

But there are two greater treats in the picture – three if you count Ryan Gosling ‘s miraculous spectator shoes – which he never takes off as the years roll by – and the first of these is a hill-top dance duet which is a masterpiece of simple choreography in concert with two performers caused to be willing to be in such concert that you leave knowing the story has told us, if they don’t quite know it themselves, that they are in love.

The second of these greater treats is a monologue Emma Stone does as an acting audition for a film. I say not one word more about any of this or these.

The film resembles New York, New York, with Emma Stone in the Lisa Minnelli part and Ryan Gosling in the Robert De Niro part, except that Gosling is more convincing as a musician, and, of course, De Niro is never convincing as A New York Jew, either there or in The Last Tycoon. He was and has remained a New York Lower East Side, Little Italy Italian. So, on the level of acting La La Land is the more satisfying picture.

Ryan Gosling is a cold actor. And I like him for it. It suits the cool, hip flat affect of a jazz person, because they’re a lot of them like that. But I like that quality in him anyhow. It reveals a certain ruthlessness of temperament which does not seek approval. Not too many actors get far as cold actors, but some do, and there are some I like a good deal. Barbara Stanwyck was one. Gosling’s face is a mask that reveals everything. Everything that belongs to his part, and nothing besides. I honor him for it every time.

So, do go to see La La Land. Waiting for the show to start, I nipped in to catch the end of Jackie. Six people were in the multiplex. All I can say of what I saw is that Natalie Portman has misconstrued the role and is not talented enough to play it even had she not misconstrued it, that the authors have misconstrued the picture, and that Billy Crudup is a top-flight talent no matter what. La La Land was mostly full and ended up, having gone through some interesting, and difficult passages, with an audience satisfied.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Classic Movie Musical, Dance & Dancing, Emma Stone, J.K. Simmons, Ryan Gosling, Singing & Dancng Musical

 
 
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