Tag: Margot Robbie

Screening Room: ‘Babylon’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Damien Chazelle’s rollicking and ridiculous epic cautionary tale, Babylon, opens next week.

My review is at PopMatters:

Babylon has buckets of frenzy and excess at a wildly uneven three hours. That is not always a bad thing. Given the mid-to-late 1920s Hollywood setting, low-key would have been a betrayal. It’s the silent era pinnacle when entrepreneurial nobodies made quicksilver fortunes by producing gauzy cinematic fantasies with hubris, moxie, and artistry. Chazelle’s Hollywood is a playground where boozing heartthrobs like Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and drugged-out bombshells like Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) put the pedal to the metal without consequence based solely on how good they look on that screen. It is also a place where a striver like Manny Torres (Diego Calva) can transform himself from gofer to director, and jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) can vault from the bandstand to stardom. As Penny Lane would say in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous’ Penny Lane would say, “It’s all happening”…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Birds of Prey’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Comics-Graphic Novels, Film - NewLeave a comment

Birds of Prey
(Warner Bros.)

My review of the new DC Comics movie Birds of Prey, which is playing now everywhere, was published at Slant Magazine:

The self-consciously ornate subtitle for Birds of Prey—And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn—lays out the reason for this film’s existence far better than the first 45 minutes or so of jumbled exposition that follow. In theory, the self-consciously goofy story of a “badass broad” who breaks free from being pole-dancing eye candy for her villain boyfriend to carve out a life for herself would be a welcome addition to a canon of films still in thrall to hyper-buff and hyper-serious dudes. And surrounding her with a squad of equally fierce and sarcastic female ass-kickers has the potential for a vibrant, pop-punk comedic franchise: Think Guardians of the Galaxy by way of Barb Wire. But since the film can never figure out how seriously to take its heroine, or how to gin up a halfway engaging caper what could have been an emancipation ends up feeling more like a trap for the character…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

That’s Leonard DiCaprio playing a has-been 1950s Western actor in Quentin Tarantino’s latest, broadest, and potentially strangest genre mash-up.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is playing pretty much everywhere now. My review is at PopMatters:

You might have thought Quentin Tarantino would be the last filmmaker to indulge in the lamentable trend of digitally inserting actors into scenes they were not there for…. Nevertheless, here Tarantino is in his ninth movie, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, slipping Leonardo DiCaprio into a scene from John Sturges’s 1963 film, The Great Escape. Once that line has been crossed for Tarantino, who had previously restricted himself to homage, what’s next? Uma Thurman slotted into Enter the Dragon? Maybe Bradley Cooper into Where Eagles Dare?…

Here’s the trailer (sure you’ve already seen it 10 times, check it out again, that Mamas and the Papas song is fantastic):

Screening Room: ‘I, Tonya’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New1 Comment

In 1994, the world of professional skating was hurled into the burgeoning tabloid TV landscape when an assailant clubbed skater Nancy Kerrigan and suspicion fell on another skater, Tonya Harding. The resulting media firestorm was like a runup to the O.J. trial.

Margot Robbie stars as Harding in the inside-out comedy I, Tonya, which opens next week. My review is at PopMatters:

“This is bullshit. I never did this,” Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) assures viewers in the meta-comedy I, Tonya just after she is seen unloading a blast of buckshot at her fleeing husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan). Not that most of us would blame her. At that point, we already saw Jeff beat her for saying the wrong thing, or just for being there. Before that there was a long stretch of verbal and emotional abuse from LaVona (Allison Janney), Tonya’s cold-eyed villain of a mother. So this is somebody who had good reason to pick up a shotgun and let fly…