RickBrands

So, I just came back from a screening of Killers of the Flower Moon, which surpassed The Irishman (175,000,000$), Scorsese's previous record for most expensive (somewhat) biographical film ever made, by twenty-five million dollars.

Mathematically, that comes down to about a million bucks a minute of actual story; this movie has a 206' runtime, including the end credits which take well over a quarter of an hour. Not only that, but I think Thelma Schoonmaker could've easily left at least twenty minutes of filler on the cutting room floor - but that was also my opinion regarding both The Irishman and Silence, so there's that. All three just felt like needlessly spun-out, and yes, pretentious attempts at 'cinematic grandstanding' that lost sight of what movies should be all about: telling a good story well.

Now, I'm not a big fan of most of those Disney/DC roller coasters either, but I think both extremes are totally, and tonally, missing that simple point.

Thing is: it's an okay movie, based on a terribly fascinating piece of harrowing history, but I just don't feel it was communicated within the right kind of gritty atmosphere; if anything, Scorsese could've created a far more gripping experience if all of it hadn't looked so polished, postured, and 'perfected'. I'm not just talking about the admittedly stunning, but overly slick cinematography, but also the squeaky-clean costumes, which mostly held their anachronistically 'off-the-rack' gloss as year upon year passed by storywise. It just felt inauthentic to me - one egregious example of this is a significant Stetson hat that DiCaprio's character is gifted at the start of the movie, which doesn't even look remotely crumpled or worn far further on in the story.

The acting by pretty much everyone is wonderful, though (especially Lily Gladstone, who positively obliterates DiCaprio), as are the soundtrack and often witty, powerful dialogues, but the overall pacing and character development, to me, felt way off - which made an already long movie feel like an even longer slog to get through (kinda like this run-on sentence). To top it all off, without spoiling too much, it all ends in a weirdly incongruent coda that felt both tacky and tacked on, concluding in a bloviating self-insert by Mister Director, which positively reeked of shameless narcissism.

That being said: I don't think this is a bad movie at all - but still. Two hundred million dollars? This should've been a full-blown masterpiece, and it's decidedly not.

As a leftist, anti-racist, feminist kind of person, I fully encourage any talented documentarian to show us an unbiased, measured overview of Ye's descent from well-liked, talented musician into crazed, uninformed, fascist lunacy - but this is not it. 'The Trouble with KanYe' features many of the issues the documentary genre has fallen prey to in the past decade or so - such as an obnoxiously narcissistic journalist in the main role, clearly orchestrated interview setups, suggestive montage tricks, and a whole lot of leading questions, with the filmmaker pushing a narrative during interviews that was not always necessarily on the table. How this empty husk of an 'exposé' got financed and distributed by the BBC - an institution I used to cherish for its quality programming in my youth - just goes to show how much of its integrity has gone down the drain.

As it happens, I watched this preposterous B-movie immediately after one of the most recent Marvel flicks, and honestly: it turned out to be far better regarding editing, soundtrack, and screenplay - not that that's necessarily saying much.

Of course, the effects aren't on nearly the same level, but at least the filmmakers knew exactly what they were going for, and communicated their intention from the get-go. Really: I enjoyed this schlocky spectacle a whole big bunch, and Alice Orr Ewing is a star to keep an eye on, as she acts the Hell out of her role - pun obviously intended.

It's been a long time since I was able to just sit back and enjoy the overt ridiculousness of the entire Biblical spiel, and for me, it wasn't even a 'guilty pleasure' or anything - just entertaining fun.