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chicagoindiecritics · 5 years ago

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New from Every Movie Has a Lesson by Don Shanahan: REWIND REVIEW: Where’d You Go, Bernadette

(Image: cnn.com)

For an occasional new segment, Every Movie Has a Lesson will cover upcoming home media releases combining an “overdue” or “rewind” film review, complete with life lessons, and an unboxed look at special features.

WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE

There are parallels between which filmmaker Richard Linklater always seems to operate. It was either “free-wheeling fun” or “poignant realism” with “scant middle ground.” Call them Party Linklater and Deep Linklater. The question mark skipped from the title of Where’d You Go, Bernadette can be placed in the sentence of which Linklater did we get? Welcome to the uncharted and unexpected “scant middle ground” where grandiose fiction is the party and odd eccentricity is the depth.

Neurotically charming, yet misshapen in many ways, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is wholly unique from the Texan and Hollywood outsider. The movie has the equal ability to disarm and disgust depending on your perspective or experience with the Maria Semple source material. Non-readers will float with the staccato blustering and the Antarctic kayak currents of fancy. Ardent fans will wonder where all the scintillating mystery went that gave merit to all the haphazard happenings beset on the family of narrator Balakrishna Branch, affectionately known as “Bee” and played by debuting talent Emma Nelson.

ANTICIPATORY SET AND PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:

Bee is the uber-precocious 15-year-old daughter of a pair of brilliant-minded, attracted opposites. Her father is the Microsoft-backed tech innovator Elgin Branch, played by Billy Crudup, earning industry kudos and TED Talk stages with groundbreaking new mind-to-text recognition software. The extroverted and borderline workaholic is matched by his reclusive and agoraphobic wife and Bee’s titular mother, played by Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett and her bangs. Detailed by exposition-minded video essays viewed by characters on screen, Bernadette Fox was once the toast of Los Angeles and the most brilliant architectural design savant of her generation before professional disappointment burned and stomped over her creativity.

LESSON #1: “THE BRAIN IS A DISCOUNTING MECHANISM” — Bernadette’s own explanatory observations of self-diagnosis are fueled by empirical study, plenty of science, and a side of doubting bullshit. It’s true that the brain looks for risk and signals accordingly. To call it a design flaw for danger instead of joy, however, is where you squint at the woman’s nuttiness to a degree. Still, this background and Cate’s delivery of it all sheds light on the movie’s nervous system.

For years, Bernadette has buried herself in two projects: being a mom and endlessly tinkering with restoring a huge derelict old school building into the family’s home in the Seattle burbs. Anxiety has grown into to insomnia and a racing heart during social and domestic confrontations. Her most common clashes are anything requiring Bernadette to interact and keep up with the joneses of the hoity-toity private school Bee attends (something matching of Semple’s inspiration). That judgy crowd is led by the granola and snooty next door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig) and her minion Soo-Lin (TV actress Zoe Chao) who works with Elgin.

LESSON #2: DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES ON FAILING LIVES — We learn a great deal about where Elgin and Bernadette stand in a dynamite sequence of two separated venting sessions. Elgin has approached a psychiatrist (Judy Greer) about how to deal with his wife. In a different location, Bernadette catches up with an old colleague (Laurence Fishburne) that she hasn’t seen in years. Deftly constructed with surgical editing from Linklater regular Sandra Adair, his lament combines with her rant. His conclusion is help while hers is to create, showing just how far apart the two former lovebirds are now.

Outside of her impressionable daughter, Bernadette’s verbose and unrestrained external monologue is received and filtered through “Manjula,” her unseen automated text-to-speech personal assistant service. Even with the prospect of an Antarctic cruise vacation for Bee on the horizon, all of the loose threads of Bernadette’s current course are unraveling to several breaking points. Everyone can see these potential disasters coming except her and the loyal Bee who considers her mother her best friend.

MY TAKE:

LESSON #3: LOVE SOMEONE’S FLAWS — The movie presents a family that still loves the mess that Bernadette has become. Her husband, for all his worry, remains a willing confidante. The nearly unconditional love between daughter and mother is tremendous. Mom defends her daughter’s independence and the resilient girl gives it right back in the face of the catty other moms. Accepting and inspiring familial love trumps every quirk or mistake and the film forces a great many syrup-coated steps to ensure that happens.

Showing off as much if not more unstable petulance as she did winning the Oscar for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett bring a dizzying level of detail to her characterization of depressed pizzazz and wallowing pluck and play Bernadette Fox. There is never a wasted movement or breath with Cate. This is complete immersion and her vocal and physical expressions and actions of exasperation are fascinating to watch. Sure, maybe we’ve seen this level of difficulty before from the newly-minted 50-year-old, but the capability and brilliance she brings to these odd roles is nearly second to none. Put her right there next to Meryl Streep where her dedication to any and every challenge cannot be questioned.

Across from that celebrated star of rich and storied career heights is Emma Nelson, the rookie in her first movie. Experience be damned, she becomes the emotional linchpin of the whole darn thing. Every arc of personal improvement for Bernadette lifts one for Bee and the first-timer exudes mettle and moxie. That girl is going places besides just her next year of high school.

Admittedly, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is tricky business for Richard Linklater. Semple’s best-seller is a uniquely mystery-driven collection of documents, emails, and transcripts, stuff not easy or clear to translate on screen without heavy narration or the wild visual creativity of something like Searching. Linklater and the Me and Orson Welles screenwriting team of Holly Gent and Vince Palmo bent and stripped away that hop-scotch of truth and “you never know everything” intrigue to fashion something more straight-forward and safe as a character piece narrative. In doing so, the resulting film skimps on opportunities to wreck more havoc in personal lives. The fits and spurts of how far to raise eyebrows comes out in the film’s unevenness. Luckily, the acting is steadfast and satisfying.

LESSON #4: TAKE A JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY — Critique aside, the clear goal for Linklater was to create or hone something more pleasant than a tawdry yarn of competing gossip. The third act of this movie takes a walkabout-ish excursion and turn for Bernadette and company brings aims positivity to elevate the doldrums of everyone’s downward spiral. Choose your journey to reinvigorate your soul. The Antarctica location doesn’t matter. It’s the fact you take one when you need it most.

3 STARS

EXTRA CREDIT:

(Image: filmlinc.org)

The 20th Century Fox home media edition of Where’d You Go, Bernadette offers a tiny sprinkle of background on Linklater’s feature film. Tiny does mean tiny. There are only three special features and one of them is a 26-picture gallery of production stills. That’s hardly a deep dive. Someday, a talkative casual guy like director Richard Linklater needs to grace us with an audio commentary on the level with his legendary Dazed & Confused track. Until then, these vignette crumbs made the Trailer Park Content house will have to do.

The main feature is the 15-minute “Bringing Bernadette to Life.” It’s a sharp behind-the-scenes retrospective on how this project came to be with its assembled talent. The blue-jeans-casual director talks about how he was introduced to and dissected Maria Semple’s book with his trusted screenwriting collaborators Holly Gent and Vince Palmo. Linklater was captivated from the opening line of “Just because you can’t fully know somebody doesn’t mean you can’t try” while Cate Blanchett called it a “bugger” to adapt with its format of letters and emails. Richard’s goal was the show everything about the main character and not shy away from raw truths and painful confrontations.

Blanchett was the actress Linklater pictured while reading Semple’s novel and came to realize she was the only one to pull off this discombobulated lead role. The Oscar winner puts in her interview time in the feature discussing all the quirks and themes. For a fun fact, Blanchett wore Semple’s own sunglasses from when she wrote the novel. Furthermore, nice bouquets are also shared by Emma Nelson, Billy Crudup, and Kristen Wiig. Each player speaking on the main character and her wavelengths.

The second mini-doc is the five-minute “Who Is Bernadette.” For a movie about thinking and talking out loud, we get the talent thinking and talking out loud. It’s more of the same with the edited montages set to the voiceover sharing of the cast and crew. It’s not much, but the insight is appreciated, especially with Semple herself offering her stamp of approval. All in all, the special features won’t be the reason one purchases this movie. They’ll be there for the finished film itself.

LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#843)

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popculturereport · 8 years ago

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Some Thoughts about Power Rangers Jungle Fury

Blame it on Boom Studios.

So, like every child of the ‘90’s, I loved the Power Rangers growing up. Before Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network existed, I would religiously tune into Fox Kids every Saturday morning so I could watch X-Men: The Animated Series and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. While I remained an X-Men fan for life, I stopped following Power Rangers sometime after the movie. That was all well and good, but then Boom Studios had to go and launch a MMPR ongoing that ended being really good. That fired up the nostalgia machine, and the next thing I knew I was rewatching episodes of Mighty Morphin.

I didn’t rewatch the entirety of the series, because it’s over 150 episodes, and, I mean, I got shit to do, but on an impulse, I started watching the most recent series, Power Rangers Dino Charge, which was so good that I watched the whole thing. Now I’m interested in watching other iterations, so arrived at Jungle Fury through the incredibly scientific process of liking the name of the title and the concept of “Kung Fu Power Rangers.” Anyway, here’s some thoughts:

The Good:

The Characters: because I was raised on the one-note characters of MMPR, my expectations in this area are quite low, so I was pleasantly surprised by the cast of Jungle Fury. Not only is each of the principals well-defined, but they, especially Casey, also experience genuine growth over the course of the series. Further, every Ranger is likeable and easy to connect with. Granted, some fans find RJ annoying (otherwise known as people who hate fun), but he’s actually the best character in the show. Not only is David de Lautour the strongest actor in the cast (check out his interactions with his father in “One Master Too Many”), but the character is quite clever in the way that it plays with the audience’s expectations for a Kung Fu master and then turns it on its head (something that the show even jokes about when Casey, RJ, and Lily assume that the older Asian man is their new master in the first episode). The villains are also nicely developed with the primary antagonist undergoing a genuine arc. Jarrod’s “bad guy tempted to be good” is another clever inversion on a traditional storytelling trope. Even Camille, the villain’s sidekick, gets a kind of arc and development, owing to her love for Jarrod.

The Plot (mostly): One of the best parts of Jungle Fury was in the way that the series really committed to its theme of Kung Fu. Many series have themes, but only make half-hearted use of them and end up pretty much just Power Rangers business as usual; however, Jungle Fury incorporated a lot tropes from kung fu and used them quite effectively for the story. For example, each of the rangers studies with a mentor to help them become more powerful (even better, these lessons also saw the Rangers develop further as characters, which, again, harkens back to the great characterization in this series). In a clever twist, the primary villain mirrors the Rangers’ development by training and studying under evil mentors himself. Further, this makes the overall overarching story feel like it’s building towards something grand and epic, rather than a series of monster-of-the-week episodes.

The Fights: Again, the show really demonstrates how committed it is to its theme, incorporating the kung fu aspects into the fight choreography as well. I’ll admit that I tend to zone out a bit during the Zord sequences, but Jungle Fury kept me considerably more engaged than some of the other series that I’ve watched.

The Rinshi God, I love the Rinshi so much and their double-footed hop.

The Bad:

The Costumes: Personally, I don’t hate them as much as some, but they’re definitely in the bottom half of the franchise as a whole. The original suits aren’t bad, but, for whatever reason, the white neck really bothers me. The Jungle Master suits are also a definite upgrade on the base suits; however, the Purple and White Ranger costumes are just godawful.

The Monsters: Here’s my incredibly basic criteria for good Power Rangers monsters: do I remember them when the episode is over? Now, obviously, I can’t name every monster from a season that I like, but I can picture several different monsters from both MMPR and Dino Charge (I smile a bit when I think about the one created by Swatt and Baboo out of a bunch of random sports equipment and a stoplight). When judged on those criteria, Jungle Fury falls short. Outside of Carnisoar, Jellica, and Grizzaka (and, of course, the incredible Rinshi), I can't recall a single monster. That's....not good.

The Finale: Remember how I raved about how great the plot was a couple of paragraphs ago? Yeah, a lot of that was undone by an anticlimactic final. So the entire series is basically one giant build, with the Rangers getting progressively stronger and gaining new powers and techniques while Jarrod simultaneously powered up. Then the Rangers manage to separate Jarrod from Dai Shi, convert Jarrod and Camille to their side, bring back the Spirit Rangers, and gather everyone together, but all they need to do to defeat Dai Shi’s dragon form is chant a few things. Jungle Fury doesn’t seem to get a lot of love from fans (although, for that matter, it doesn’t seem to get a lot of hate either), and I think the final episode is a big reason why people aren’t more passionate about the series.

…And the Accents?

Ever since Disney purchased the franchise, filming has taken place in New Zealand, meaning that the cast of each series is typically made up of Australians and Kiwis’. In fact, not a single American is in the main cast of Jungle Fury. Here’s my arbitrarily-assigned score for each character:

Casey (Jason Smith)–8.5/10: I actually thought Smith was Canadian until I looked him up on IMDB and found he’s actually Australian. His accent is pretty good, but the giveaway is how unnatural his voice sounds when he’s shouting his dialogue after transforming.

Theo (Aljin Abella)–7/10: Theo is another one who I was a bit surprised by; his voice sometimes comes across as stiff, which I initially assumed was a deliberate acting choice rather than because he was hiding an Australian accent.

Lily (Anna Hutchison)–5/10: Anna Hutchison loses points for inconsistency; more than half the time, but when it slips, it really slips.

RJ (David de Lautour)–8/10: RJ might be the best of the bunch, but I also feel that David de Lautour had an easier job since he merely had to imitate a very specific accent–the stereotypical surfer–rather than a more general American accent like the others.

Dom (Nikolai Nikolaeff)–7/10: This is unrelated, but it was really hard for me to get over seeing one of the Russian mobsters from Daredevil playing the White Ranger.

Fran (Sarah Thomson)–8/10

Camille (Holly Shanahan)–7/10

Jarrod/Dai Shi (Bede Skinner)–3/10: At least he tried?

Power Rangers Power Rankings

Dino Charge

Jungle Fury

MMPR

#power rangers #power rangers jungle fury #jungle fury #casey rhodes #theo martin #lily chilman

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