30 Days of Oscar Day 29: The Iron Lady

Movie: The Iron Lady
Year: 2012
Nominations:  Best Actress - Meryl Streep, Best Makeup
Wins/Snubs: Hard to say - Streep won the Golden Globe, but Davis won the SAG award, so this could go either way.   As for makeup, it's impressive, so hard to say.  It's up against Harry Potter 7.2 and Albert Nobbs.  Since HP hasn't been nominated before, perhaps it will take it, especially since the period pieces might split the vote.  However, it is a really impressive achievement in makeup.


When I was growing up Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ruled the world, as least as far as I knew.  So I was familiar with her global reputation, but less so with her ratings at home or her rise to power.  Sadly, even after seeing this movie, I only know slightly more about the Falklands war and the fact that she now has dementia.  The movie made the fatal flaw of any biopic - trying to tell us so much, they leave us with nothing.  

Margaret Thatcher (an unrecognizable Meryl Streep) is living with a debilitating dementia, and much of the movie is shown as flashbacks, from her childhood as a shopkeeper's daughter to her first failed attempt to run for office and ultimately her life as Prime Minister.  She also marries Dennis Thatcher (an amazing Jim Broadbent), who supports her and has now begun to haunt her dementia after his death.   The problem with trying to just show us her entire life is that they can't show a full picture of any part of her life.  Yes, she was the first female Prime Minister, but she wasn't the first female Member of Parliament, yet the movie doesn't show any others.  They gloss over that entire concept by showing an ironing board in the ladies room and business being negotiated in the men's room.   Yes, she had to navigate a new path to be taken seriously as Prime Minister and had consultants advise her.  That idea is shown entirely in a discussion of pearls and a lesson on lowering her voice so as not to be "shrill".  There were some interesting moments about her struggles going to war and making decisions both as a mother and a Prime Minister.  


Meryl Streep did a terrific job in this, and as much as I LOVED The Help and Viola Davis, I wouldn't be disappointed to see Meryl win.  However, I do think Viola should win as she took a role and elevated the movie with her performance.  Meryl took a role and did a good job despite the movie.  


One of the annoying things I do when a movie is dull or shallow like The Iron Lady is I sit and think of ways they could have done the film in a way I might have enjoyed more.   Jim Broadbent's performance as Dennis Thatcher was fascinating.  He was a man in the 1960s who was able to support a wife who became the most famous woman in the world for a time.  They had a long, mostly successful marriage.  When he's haunting her, he's funny, bullying, kind, rude, and everything in between.  I think telling her story through his eyes would have given us more of the story - we see really well how she ended up, but the story of how she got there just wasn't well done.  My alternative movie His Iron Lady would have shown us what she was like at the END of the day deciding to send troops to the Falklands and how he felt about nearly being blown up at a hotel by the IRA because he was the Prime Minister's husband.  I thought his story was much more interesting and would have given a direction toward telling the important parts of her story.  A disappointing attempt to tell a story that I really want to hear.  And since this always pisses me off - the trailer on IMDB shows the course of her life, but not a single moment of her present circumstance which is about 2/3 of the film itself.  Argh. 2.5 of 5 stars/lambs

Movie Meme Day 28 - Most Overhyped movie

There are a lot of reasons a movie could be considered over-hyped.  Either it's the newest movies from a actor/director who hasn't worked in a long time.  Or perhaps it's the final movie by a beloved actress/director before their death.  Perhaps it was just a huge movie that got lots of buzz and everyone knew it was coming.  And then there are the movies that get described as over-hyped because they failed to live up to the promise of all the hype.  In today's Hollywood of mass-marketing, constant trailers, hints, gossip, etc., lots of movies are misrepresented in those trailers and thus cannot live up to that promise, because it wasn't what they were created to be.   I describe them as "marketing mistakes".  I think Brothers, Catch and Release and Leatherheads all fit into that category.  Here's my previous review of Leatherheads and why it couldn't live up to the hype.

So George Clooney's Leatherheads is many things. It's a one-minute buddy comedy, a one-minute screwball comedy, a one-minute romantic comedy, with one-minute about the old rules of the NFL, two minutes about the new rules of the NFL, and two minutes about being a war hero. By my calculation that means the movie should be about eight minutes long. The other 90 minutes don't seem to do much. This movie was marketed, right in the tagline, as a story about football - the original professional football players and how they became legitimate. This is NOT a sports movie. And then it was supposed to be about the love triangle with Clooney, Renee Zellwegger and John Krasinski (totally inappropriate for this role, still channeling Jim rather than this character). That doesn't happen, except for the lipstick scene shown repeatedly in the commercials. The war-hero story line was interesting, but kept losing it's focus between other non-plot points. So basically, this is a terrific 8-minute movie, but I wouldn't bother with the rest.

Brothers: Review

I've always liked Natalie Portman, so I knew I had to see Brothers, even though the subject wasn't really one I was interested in watching. One of my big pet peeves with movies is when a movie is marketed as one genre, but really falls into another, or usually not into one at all. The previews for Brothers made it seem like Natalie and Tobey Maguire were married, he went off to war, is presumed dead and she takes up with his brother, ne'erdowell Jake Gyllenhaal. While the basics of that summary are true, the movie is mostly two different stories that intersect toward the end: one following Maguire as he suffers being a POW and then suffers the trauma again when he returns and a second story following a widow trying to come to terms with the loss of her husband and raising her girls alone, but with the help of her good friend and former brother-in-law. About halfway through the movie I was thinking, "wow, Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal have absolutely no chemistry, this is going to make it hard to believe they fall in love like the previews suggest". However, their relationship was perfectly constructed, platonic love, fraternal, friendly, and nothing more. The previews make it look like they fell in love because the first story line needs to intersect theirs when Maguire returns home, and the filmmakers chose paranoia about his wife and brother getting it on as his form of coping/PTSD symptom. Until the two story lines are forced to interact, the movie is really good. Maguire is a crazed victim of his captors and can't cope with what they forced him to do and the constant torture (short glimpses of this or the movie wouldn't be tolerable) and we see him fall apart during his captivity from a strong marine to a broken man. In the other story we see Portman and Gyllenhaal lean on each other to cope with the loss, rebuilding their lives and helping the little girls deal with life moving on. The ending seems overly constructed and overly dramatic to allow all the characters to be really emotional, but actually loses the dramatic push the movie was building up to throughout. Good, but not great movie. I'm not sure how they should have marketed the film to make it seem more like a soldier's survival story rather than a love-triangle gone wrong, but it would have been easier to have enjoyed the movie without the incorrect preconceptions I had from the previews. 2 of 5 stars/lambs

Leatherheads, another marketing failure

So George Clooney's Leatherheads is many things. It's a one-minute buddy comedy, a one-minute screwball comedy, a one-minute romantic comedy, with one-minute about the old rules of the NFL, two minutes about the new rules of the NFL, and two minutes about being a war hero. By my calculation that means the movie should be about eight minutes long. The other 90 minutes don't seem to do much. This movie was marketed, right in the title, as a story about football. The original profession football players and how they became legitimate. This is NOT a sports movie. And then it was supposed to be about the love triangle with Clooney, Renee Zellwegger and John Krasinski (totally inappropriate for this role, still channelling Jim rather than this character). That doesn't happen, except for the lipstick scene shown repeatedly in the commercials. The war-hero story line was interesting, but kept losing it's focus between other non-plot points. So basically, this is a terrific 8-minute movie, but I wouldn't bother with the rest. 2 LAMBS/stars