Tag: Michael Keaton

Movie Review: THE FOUNDER – as a “true” story I question some of it, but Keaton’s revival continues with another great performance.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews4 Comments

In The Founder, the resurgent Michael Keaton (Spider Man: Homecoming) plats Ray Kroc, the man behind the staggeringly successful McDonalds empire.  When I first heard of this movie, it didn’t seem all that interesting to me.  Ubiquity, I feel, tends to make people take things for granted, render them too familiar   – and familiarity doth breed contempt, right?  How many movies have there been about captains of industry?  Biographies tend to be about those who have done things that made a difference in people’s lives, or embroiled in scandal.  But a movie about the guy who invented McDonalds (I’ll explain that comment later) just seems somehow unnecessary.  Turns out, it’s a pretty good movie.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who’ve literally never eaten anything from McDonalds, but the numbers of people who have are astounding.  It’s not a go-to place for me, but I’ve eaten there a number times, and sampled enough of their menu that I know it’s never going to become a go-to place.  But the food isn’t terrible – you may argue with that from a personal level, but your opinion would fly in the face of the company’s overwhelming success.  McDonald’s is one of the biggest corporations on the planet, and if you ever wondered why, the story is right there on Wikipedia  – but watch The Founder first.

It’s the story of three people, actually.  There’s Ray Kroc, of course, and if you don’t know the story (I only had a vague idea of the company’s history) you may wonder why the company is called McDonald’s.  The movie tells this story.  Prior to meeting Dick and Maurice McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carrol Lynch), Kroc was a struggling salesman putting in long road hours trying to sell one gadget after another, and listening to motivational records in cheap, lonely motel rooms.  But Kroc has one of the qualities espoused in the one record we hear: persistence.  You feel for the guy early on; in the opening scenes he cuts a frustrated figure trying to sell a multi spindle milkshake blender to people who don’t care.  But you can tell that this device actually makes a lot of sense, and from that, you understand that Kroc is not just a guy peddling “the next big thing”, he’s someone who feels he knows what the “next big thing” should be, it’s the others who don’t get it.  And this, essentially, is the story of McDonalds.  When a small San Bernardino diner orders an unprecedented six of these blenders, upped, in a phone call, to eight, Kroc heads across country to meet the brothers, and is amazed at the innovative approach they’ve developed to the food service industry.  Dubbed the “Spee-Dee” system, it’s the assembly line principle of industrial manufacturing that led to the common phrase “fast food” we use today.  Dick McDonald is the pig headed of the two brothers, running a tight ship with the control-freak obsessiveness that led to both the success of the company, and to the failure of his dream.  Maurice is the more passive of the two, but it’s his selflessness that leads Dick to listen to Kroc’s eagerness to expand the concept.

From this point, the movie charts the meteoric rise of the McDonald’s franchise, but the movie is not called McDonald’s, it’s called The Founder, and it focuses almost solely on the efforts of Kroc, sometimes in opposition to the brothers McDonald, and as a biopic it does a good job showing the ups and downs of the subject.  The accuracy of the story is as debatable, as any movie based on a “true” story is, but as I’ve said in other reviews, the first job of a movie is to entertain, and I was entertained throughout.  Kroc is not exactly depicted in a negative light – even when some of his actions seem questionable, there are other scenes in the movie that imply justification.  When Kroc announces to his wife during dinner that he wants a divorce, it’s after years (and many scenes) of obvious incompatibility, not because he’s prone to having affairs on the road.  When he decides to ignore the agreement he entered into with the McDonald brothers, it’s after Dick McDonald has shot down every idea and suggestion Kroc has tried to discuss with him.  The decisions Kroc takes in the movie all seem pretty justifiable, and perfectly in character for the man: he’s driven by the need to succeed, but you never get the sense that it’s a soulless, greed-driven life.  I wondered if that was the case in real life, because what you don’t get in the movie is a feeling of consequence.  Throughout, the opening of franchises across the country are as easy as Kroc pitching the concept, then signing contracts.  It’s all handled like shorthand.  So too, when he falls for the wife of a Minneapolis restauranteur (Linda Cardellini and Patrick Wilson), it’s filmed as an innocent love-at-first-sight moment.  There’s no follow up on the effect on that marriage, even though, as you may have already taken from this review, there was a massive effect on that marriage.  There is something about the movie that makes the building of the McDonald’s empire, and the transformation of Kroc from struggling door-to-door salesman to wealthy entrepreneur, as something that was relatively easy, and I’m willing to bet that was never actually the case.

There’s something that’s ultimately satisfying about watching a well made biopic, even if, like me, you come away from it feeling key moments were glossed over.  I was grabbed by the story immediately.  I’m a long time fan of Keaton, and I’m really happy to be able to watch him in movies that are not called White Noise or Robocop.  I felt that losing out on the Academy Award for Birdman might have returned him to that kind of movie scrapheap, but I’m glad that hasn’t been the case.  I’d like to think that he might enjoy a late-career renaissance, and maybe he changed agents in the recent past to get him to this point.  He’s great all through The Founder, but so too are the supporting cast.  Offerman plays Dick McDonald with same kind of curmudgeonly demeanor he gives to most roles, and it works here.  Laura Dern, in a smaller role as Kroc’s wife, conveys the wasting emptiness of a marriage of mismatched people, and her scenes give the movie its humanity.

About 20 years ago my wife and I stopped at the McDonald’s in Dekalb, Illinois on our way from The Quad Cities to Chicago, and I received such shitty customer service and product, that, incensed, I said I’d never eat at McDonalds again.  My resolve lasted around 7 years, thanks to other companies having long ago adopted the Spee-Dee concept to provide quick, cheap dining.  I think it was the McRib that brought me back into the fold, and since then, I eat at McDonald’s five to ten times a year.  Like WalMart, Target, GM, and all those other giants, I never really cared about what went into making these companies what they were, and I can’t say that I care about McDonald’s now that I’ve seen the movie.  But the movie is a movie, and I cared enough about it to give it

4.0/5.0

© Andrew Hope, 2017

Movie Review: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING – not the greatest title, but this latest version of the character is a BIG step up from both Maguire and Garfield’s.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews3 Comments

Since I watched Spider Man: Homecoming, The Amazing Spider Man 2 has been on heavy rotation on TBS, and I’ve caught a few sequences over the past few days – enough to remind me how mediocre it was – indeed, some parts just descend into outright awfulness.  I was never a fan of Andrew Garfield’s two movies – the first one was serviceable, but I joined the naysayers because of the rebooted origin.  If there’s anyone alive who knows the character, they already have the origin story down.  Dressing it up a little differently and adding a veneer or familial mystery didn’t disguise the fact it was a stupid idea to essentially reboot the character as if the Raimi movies never happened.  At the very least, this is what Spider Man: Homecoming gets right.

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Movie Review: SPOTLIGHT – Oscar-winning movie with great elements, but a screenplay that felt less dramatic than I expected.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

Spotlight, a movie about The Boston Globe’s investigative journalist department, won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Original Screenplay of 2015.  As well as that, it boasts a high pedigree cast comprising the resurgent Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams, rounded out in supporting roles by Brian D’arcy James, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, and Billy Crudup (Alien:Covenant).  If there’s one thing I enjoy seeing it’s an ensemble of name actors – for me, that probably goes back to watching All Star movies like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, but I’m not alone.  I think most people probably get a kick out seeing movies like this, for whatever reason.  And Spotlight serves up an intelligent offering of adult entertainment that mostly pleased me.

For those of you who don’t know, Spotlight is the story of The Boston Globe’s investigation into the widespread child abuse committed by numerous Catholic priests in the Boston area, and how it was covered by the Boston Archdiocese, mostly through settling hush-hush deals with victims.  The months-long investigation, prompted by then-new editor Martin Baron (Schreiber), and temporarily placed on hiatus in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, yielded the ultimate prize in journalism, the Pulitzer, in 2003.  Today, the “pedophile priest” is simultaneously a cliché figure and a tragedy of epic proportion, and the work of the Spotlight team paved the way for the uncovering of child abuse on a global scale.  After the movie ends, but before the credit roll, there’s a staggering list of cities across the world where this vile epidemic has been revealed.  Child abuse is bad enough, but the fact that an organization such as the Catholic church actively hid the secret, indeed, allowed it to spread by reassigning pedophiles to other communities, is nothing short of monstrous.  I don’t have a religious bone in my body, and to me, these actions prove the evil of religion, and the terrible effect it has had on humanity.  But this is a movie review, not a soapbox, and I’ll quit it with the personal comments.

I watched Spotlight over two sittings.  I had just gotten back to my hotel room while visiting Miami at the weekend and could only get to the halfway point – not because I didn’t like it, but because I was fair cream-crackered (look it up).  I resumed the following evening from where I left off, and I don’t feel my viewing enjoyment or analysis was adversely affected.  Why bother telling you that?  Because while I enjoyed the movie just fine, I’m not convinced the screenplay was worthy of an Oscar.

Going back a little bit in time to 1976, All The President’s Men told a similar tale of intrepid journalism, here uncovering the labyrinthine conspiracy that came to be known as Watergate, setting the table for this kind of movie.  But where Alan J Pakula’s multi-Oscar winning movie was densely layered and dripping with menace (it lost Best Picture to Rocky, if you’re wondering), Spotlight feels a little lightweight dramatically.  Like All The President’s Men, Spotlight features a conspiracy that goes “all the way to the top”; a story that could fall apart until key figures perform last minute U turns and agree to go on the record; passionate reporters; level headed reporters; editors who stand to lose their reputations if the story turns out wrong, or is scooped by rivals.  It even features an organization so powerful that …  at least, that’s what we’re told throughout the movie.  The Catholic Church has such a tight hold on the Boston area that District Attorneys, cops, politicians are under its wide-reaching influence.  Yet at the same time, the story in Spotlight doesn’t show this kind of power.  In fact, it mostly seems effortless for the Spotlight team to get what they need to get.  The strongest conflict to be found in the movie is when Mark Ruffalo’s Michael Rezendez (the outspoken journalist) encounters a city clerk who won’t let him into the archives at the end of the work day.  At no point do you feel that the journalists are in any danger whatsoever – either to their lives or jobs.  As powerful as the Boston Diocese is supposed to be, it doesn’t appear to take any great steps to protect its dark, shameful secret.  But of course, it has to seem difficult, and Howard Shore’s brooding, urgent score gives the movie an air of danger that is just not present anywhere in Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer’s screenplay.  Perhaps the subject matter is enough, and that the team were never really in any kind of professional or personal danger, but the constant hyping of the church’s power ends up a stale plot thread, having no payoff.  The story is turned in, it gets published, and that’s it.  So why should I complain about this?  Because a movie is not a true story.  It might resemble true events, and even purport to tell a story of what actually happened, but that’s why documentaries are for.  Neither McCarthy or Singer worked for the Globe during this time, and they made stuff up for the sake of plot conveniences.  The scene where Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) gets a priest to casually admit he molested boys was tweaked – Pfeiffer didn’t interview the priest, another Globe reporter did.  The movie also exalts the work of the Spotlight team, despite other Globe reporters writing earlier stories, and presents a scene showing a characters shame at burying those earlier stories, when if fact The Globe’s editorial edict was a lot more active than just being too blind to see the potential importance of the stories  – they simply didn’t want to print any more stories about pedophile priests.

These are issues I had with the movie, and they’re small – to ignore them is bad reviewing, but to expound further would be petty.  Whether the events are mostly accurate or not doesn’t matter to me in the context of a movie, which needs to do its own job first and foremost.  And to be fair, Spotlight delivers a good, interesting, well acted, and mostly well written movie that never once failed to engage me, but it won the Oscar for best screenplay and I don’t completely agree with that award.

One thing I really liked in this movie was the cinematography.  Unlike Gordon Willis’s work in All The President’s Men, Masanobu Takayanagi (True Story) is less imposing on the story, allowing the events to play out with an economy of style – not exactly in the style of a documentarian, but the visuals are clear and undistracting.  This isn’t to say I don’t love Willis’s job in the former – I absolutely do – but Takayanagi gave me a strong sense of the city of Boston, which is, from a high level viewpoint, one the things the movie is actually about.

Flawed, but very good viewing.

4.0/5.0

© Andrew Hope, 2017