Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
There’s not much new to see this week, but the international spy thriller The 355 releases starring Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Bingbing Fan, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o as a collection of spies from various intelligence agencies working together on one big case. Chastain is the only actor of these five I’ve highlighted before and that selection was for The Martian. To shake it up, not only am I going to pick another favorite film that Chastain has done, but I’m going a different direction for Nyong’o’s as well. Previously, I’ve talked about 12 Years a Slave a lot, so I went with another film from her oeuvre that needs a bit more praise and attention, especially for her performance.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
In Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 drama, Diane Kruger plays a German film star who turns spy for the Allies. Her role is pivotal and she makes the most of it. In a film filled to the brim with the kind of male bravado that often overshadows female characters in such film, she and Mélanie Laurent hold their own against the likes of Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger, and Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for his supporting role.
The film is of a kin to Tarantino’s later film, Django Unchained. Both are revisionist stories where a historically repressed group of individuals is embodied into a strong central character seeking revenge against those who persecuted them. While Django had a singular figure, Inglourious Basterds had a few: Jews getting revenge against the Nazis. This makes the film a strange mixture of revenge drama and war film with a hefty infusion of Tarantino’s snappy dialogue. It’s an entertaining and involving film that has more than earned its reputation as one of Tarantino’s best.
The Help (2011)
Tate Taylor’s period drama about a small southern town in the midst of racial upheaval brings audiences into the world of Kathryn Stockett’s popular novel about “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone) as she exposes the town’s sordid secrets revealed by those they least suspect of betraying them, the help. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer play two of the primary whistleblowers while Jessica Chastain has an atypical role in the film, that of a recently married woman who knows nothing about cooking and other tasks the help usually provide and bonds with Spencer’s Minny over the course of the film as she combats her husband’s quiet, intolerant view of Black people. While the film is certainly played for laughs, especially Minny’s pie scene, the film raises some important topics regarding race relations in the 1960s.
Although the film is entertaining and asks the audiences to look beneath the veneer of 1960s gloss at a serious issue, it speaks largely to an audience who either already gets what it’s trying to say or won’t likely ever get it. These individuals don’t identify themselves with the prototypical villain played by Bryce Dallas Howard even though she tries to infuse some humanity into her. Spike Lee did a far better job with that in his BlacKkKlansman several years later, but for what little there is here, we can take some solace in the fact that at least it doesn’t shy away from serious issues, even if its approach to them is slight.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
If you aren’t paying attention, you’re likely to miss Fan Bingbing in X-Men: Days of Future Past. You could say that if you Blink you’ll miss her. My terrible pun aside, Fan plays a mutant named Blink who makes a brief, albeit impactful appearance in the future of the timeline where the X-Men are on the verge of annihilation because of super advanced sentinels. It’s up to Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to go into the past and help the 1970s version of the X-Men stop Bolivar Trask from creating the mutant-killing machines. It is a follow-up to the 2011 reboot with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult playing younger versions of characters played originally by Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn, and Kelsey Grammer respectively.
If you’re a comic nerd, you have probably heard of the Days of Future Past storyline. It’s one of the most popular in the X-Men universe and makes a logical choice for bridging the gap between the original trilogy and the new films, making a way for the producers to rewrite its own history and start fresh. It had already done that, but it was a nice service for the fans and the film ends up being well acted, engaging, and exciting. Now, if only they had been able to keep to this level of quality in the subsequent two features.
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
For Penelope Cruz, I almost went with Vicky Cristina Barcelona and while she’s fine in that film, it’s one of the modern Woody Allen films I least like. I’m also way behind on my foreign feature watching, which pushes almost everything else great she’s done out, so I’m left with the serviceable, but inferior Kenneth Branagh re-adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. Agatha Christie’s novel about a train filled with passengers who all had a reason to murder the victim, legendary Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot (a mediocre Kenneth Branagh) must uncover the culprit and make a crucial decision once he does.
Like the Sidney Lumet film of 1974, Branagh attempts to assemble a cracker jack cast of famous actors. Sure, there’s Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the cast of luminaries is much dimmer than the far more impressive grouping assembled in the prior adaptation. Cruz plays the role originated by Rachel Roberts, a former maid to the Armstrong family whose infant daughter Daisy was the victim of a kidnapping and murder at the hands of Johnny Depp’s John Cassetti in this film, played with less obvious, but more sinister bile by Richard Widmark in the prior. Matter of fact, it’s hard to find an actor in this cast who’s better than the original embodiments. Cruz probably comes closest as her role is a somewhat minor one and she acquits herself nicely in it.
Us (2019)
Lupita Nyong’o won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 12 Years a Slave, but I have referenced that film plenty of times and with Us, she has an equally impressive performance to turn to as an alternative. Nyong’o’s character was traumatized as an child when she witnessed a frightening event at a beach-side carnival. She’s been effectively mute since then, refusing to speak as a result of the trauma. When she and her family vacation near the same beach, she comes face-to-face with the very strange world she was only briefly exposed to as a kid.
Jordan Peele’s follow up to his stellar debut Get Out, Us uses Peele’s estimable skills to great effect by infusing his world with a hefty amount of symbolism. This frames the action in the film as something more malevolent than the audience initially gives it credit for. The cast is terrific and the bizarre premise of the existence of a secret society of doppelgangers makes for a riveting and terrifying experience. For a sophomore effort, Peele more than convinces us that he’s a terrific director and we’ll be lucky if he continues to craft such brilliant movies for decades to come.
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