Darkest Hour reviews

ITALIANO
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by ITALIANO »

Uri wrote:Was there ever a more cringeworthy scene put on film than Churchill-on-the-Underground from this film?
Except for Carroll Baker meeting the Virgin Mary in The Miracle, none I can think of. Terrible scene, indeed. And terrible movie - I saw The Post yesterday and thought it was bad, but today I've seen this one and The Post suddenly looks like a masterpiece.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Uri »

Was there ever a more cringeworthy scene put on film than Churchill-on-the-Underground from this film? As a devoted anglophile I’ve been feeling personally offended by this genre of British-Gentry-for-low-to-middle-brow-American-tourists which seems to flourish in the last few years, from The King’s Speech (which initiated this trend) to Victoria & Abdul, from Downton Abbey to The Crown. DH is the latest and probably one of the worst of these pieces, which tend to be what we call here, thanks to Sabin, “Wikipedia Entries”. And as such, DH hits rock bottom. My favorite bit? Once the Germans invade France, someone says, in real time, there are 7 million refugees on the roads – an accumulated figure historians came up with years later and a dimwit writer stumble upon while “researching” for this script. And as always, there’s a novice pretty little thing who needs to have everything explained to in the most simplistic way so not a single viewer in the Midwest would feel left out.

But of course, the only raison d'être for this film is to provide Oldman a platform to win awards, so what one must really judge here is the PREFORMANCE. And a PREFORMANCE this one indeed is. A totally failed one, but as was indicated the other night, it does get the work done. The problem is not the acting per se, though it’s not a paragon of subtlety or complexity. This is really a bad case of casting – and vanity. No thespian, no matter how good he or she is, has a limitless range. No actor can play any given character. And no one can believably convey both Sid Vicious AND Winston Churchill. It defies the order of the Universe. What made Churchill such a remarkable public figure was him being constantly, and to the end of his long life, perceived as the favored son, and it had everything to do with his aristocratic background, breeding, his good, boyish looks as a young man and a very deep sense of inherent entitlement. Oldman simply can’t suggest any of these qualities (his strengths lies as an actor lies elsewhere, basically being the bad boy), so his performance totally lacks any hint of the charm and charisma of the real man. Add this to the very poor material he deals with (Scott Thomas is perfectly cast, still her turn amounts to nothing since all she’s got to play was a one dimensional cheerleader), and the end result is a resounding failure.

At least he fared better than Timothy Spall (another working class hero and an actor I appreciate more than Oldman) who was atrocious as The Great Man in The King’s Speech.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

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Moving this thought to a more appropriate thread...
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by dws1982 »

If I didn't know any better, I would assume that Gary Oldman had played Churchill in a very popular one-man stage show, some producers had decided he needed to play the role in a movie, so they snatched up the film rights, knew they couldn't get a one-man film produced as a mainstream movie, so they shoved in all of the usual characters you get in a Churchill biopic. The movie is absolutely not interested in any character other than Churchill, and all of the actors seem eager to cede the entire movie to Oldman. The movie doesn't offer any real point of view into any of the secondary characters (or Churchill either, for that matter), and none of the actors seem willing or ready to find one.

And other than potential Oscar recognition, what is Joe Wright trying to do? He's done several period pieces without exhibiting even a casual interest in these people or time periods. (Atonement was a slight exception, but even there he got in his own way at times.) A Julian Jerrold or a Brian Percival would be much better suited for this type of movie, and I don't mean that as a slight against them. They're good at this type of thing, and they've exhibited a good feel for these pieces. Wright's visual gimmicks give off the impression of someone who's bored with his material and doesn't have any faith in its ability to catch the audience's attention on its own. Sabin is right, he needs a superhero film. His visual gimmicks would be much more suited to that type of film.

Oldman is fine, and this is the type of performance that has won Oscars many times in the past, including the recent past. But I wonder if the voters might look somewhere else, to something more in tune with the times. Nothing about this performance feels current or at all relevant to the modern day. I think the Oldman Oscar campaign may be a test case for how much the new Academy membership influences voting.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Mister Tee »

I OFTEN READ OTHER PEOPLE'S POSTINGS BEFORE WRITING MY OWN REVIEW, BUT THIS TIME I DECIDED TO GO AHEAD WITH MINE AND LOOK AT OTHERS' AFTER, TO SEE IF WE'RE IN SYNC

I needed a palate cleanser after so many good movies in a row, so I went to Darkest Hour today. (KIdding: it just fit my schedule best.)

From the first shot -- the overhead in the House of Commons -- I had the bad reminder that this was Joe Wright, the guy who perfectly fits Damien's favored phrase "Look at me, I'm directing". I thought Damien over-used the phrase, seeming to have issues with anyone who had a flamboyant style (like, say, del Toro in Shape of Water or Innaritu in Birdman). But Wright to me is the perfect case, because his attention-grabbing shots -- the Bennet sisters flying from room to room in Pride and Prejudice, the nurses marching like they're about to launch a Busby Berkeley number in Atonement -- never seem to have any connection to the content; they seem to exist to be doing SOMETHING DIFFERENT, without any thought why. (I'll except Anna Karenina from this overall critique; that at least seemed all of a piece, and may be his most interestingly conceived film.) Here in Darkest Hour we have multiple overhead views, a bunch of tracking shots, and weird closeups (like the human eye apparently meant to represent the dead at Calais), none of which serve any dramatic purpose; they seem to be there because Wright got bored with the story.

Not that the story deserves much better. This is an extremely simplistic view of the politics of the early months of the war, with strawman peaceniks offering lame, defeatist arguments before finally being crushed before the steamroller bluster of Churchill. Granted history's vindication of Churchill's approach would have made any opposition seem limp, but surely someone could have better articulated the possible advantages of anything beyond Go-Fight-Win -- something like diplomacy? (I had the weird feeling that Trump folk will watch this movie thinking Obama with his professorial ways is the Chamberlain/Halifax wing, and only the Trump/Churchillian bluster-and-bulldoze approach wins. They could probably use it to defend Trump's lunacy on Jerusalem.) And there's really not much else to watch in this over-familiar bit of history...very little wit beyond the opening scenes, and certainly no suspense, as we know the results of both the House speech and the Dunkirk evacuation.

All of this might have been just flat and uninspired, except, near the end, the screenwriter threw in what I'd label the most appallingly cloying scene I've sat through in a movie this year: that atrocity in the underground, where everyone -- it's unanimous -- tells Churchill exactly what he wants/needs to hear. (If any of you read Tom Friedman's columns in the NY Times, he always finds a cab driver wherever he goes to perform the same courtesy.) This scene, bad as it is, manages to hit a high-note of hackdom by having the sole black passenger -- bussed in from central casting, it appears -- not only say the most important things, but complete the lines of poetry Churchill is quoting. After this scene, I actively disliked the film.

Anyone talking about supporting nominations for this film is being ridiculous. Mendehslon has the best-by-default scene ("You have my support"), but he doesn't have remotely the heft of half a dozen other candidates. And Kristen Scott Thomas does her job capably, but doesn't have much of a role. As for the performance I'm supposed to want to see win best actor...I honestly have very little reaction to it. Oldman reads the speeches well, and he does the cantankerous thing smoothly enough. But I never had a moment when I thought I was seeing into the man's inner being -- something I had frequently during Lithgow's characterization of him in The Crown.

Come to think of it, nearly any random episode of The Crown was a more interesting and moving look into 20th century British history. I obviously can't pretend I had very high hopes for this film, but it actually managed to fall short of them.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Sabin »

There are many reasons why 'Darkest Hour' didn't work for me. Anthony McCarten is a dull writer. Joe Wright is a broad director. Can we please get him a superhero film? Winston Churchill isn't a compelling subject. But maybe I'm just not in the mood to watch a film about a blustery authoritarian right now, banging the drums of war in a room full of cowards. The narrative of the film is the simplest. Winston Churchill is made PM. Everyone wants him to enter into peace talks with Hitler. Will he hold to his convictions? That's it. There are no new insights. Unless of course, one is to believe in the slightest that Churchill, a hair's breadth from buckling, found the courage to persevere from a subway full of commoners. I'm no big fan of The King's Speech, but it at least benefited from a story we hadn't heard before. Lincoln suffered a bit from a tinge of inevitability but benefited immeasurably from a vibrancy and new insight with which mid-19th century politics were brought to life. Darkest Hour benefits from neither. It definitely comes from The Theory of Everything school of Wiki-Screenwriting in that it's so overwritten you can practically see the notecards hanging off of every scene. Just like in The Theory of Everything, it's pretty remarkable how little feel at the end of the film.

Joe Wright gives it some flash but he seems bored, and often falls back on cute framing.

As for Gary Oldman...well, he's fine and good. Yes, this is a performance that relies heavily on makeup, but it's totally integrated into his performance. I could never in good faith support such a performance winning an Oscar, but this film is basically a one-man show and he deserves some credit considering that he's basically spouting speeches and exposition for over two hours and keeps it watchable.

Nothing worth waving a handkerchief over.
Last edited by Sabin on Fri Dec 08, 2017 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by The Original BJ »

I think Oldman probably sweeps the tv prizes, though I do hope the critics' groups go for some more left-field choices. The period piece tech nominations are very possible. But I have a pretty hard time imagining either the directors or writers going for this, making Best Picture iffy. But it's still possible -- the traditionalists in the Academy usually get at least something on to the Best Picture slate.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Sabin »

The Original BJ wrote
I don't often like to use the term Oscar-bait as a pejorative, because so many now just use it to describe any mainstream movie with aspirations to seriousness, but this struck me as the kind of movie that really has no point but to win people trophies.
Sounds as dreadful as the trailer promises. I’d like to think these films are going out of fashion, but a film like ‘The Imitation Game’ can still get a directing nomination over the likes of Clint Eastwood.

How do you think it will do?
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Mister Tee »

Thanks for confirming all my worst fears.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by The Original BJ »

Given that Focus Features was behind so many exciting films during my years of budding cinephilia, it's a bit discouraging to now see the studio so reliant on old fogey movies like Victoria & Abdul and Darkest Hour. (In a sense, they're repeating the Miramax narrative two decades later.)

Anyway, I found Darkest Hour -- doesn't it feel like that title is missing an article in front of it? -- to be a complete snooze. This is a totally musty history lesson, with a script that's lacking in a good number of areas. For starters, I thought the dialogue was pretty ho-hum, with a lot of lines that feel written to be "clever" but aren't actually witty or insightful about anything ("Would you stop interrupting me while I am interrupting you!") There aren't all that many characters, but many of them -- especially Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas's characters -- remain utter blanks. (Ben Mendelsohn's King George, though clearly in the shadow of Colin Firth, is maybe the exception). And as far as narrative goes, I found this pretty thin -- I'm hardly a Churchill scholar, and even I was familiar with all of the most significant plot points. This is kind of an issue for a movie whose approach to history basically seems to be "here's what happened."

Oddly, the timing of this movie's release next to Dunkirk might actually make it come off better, not because it's a superior movie to Christopher Nolan's (it's definitely not), but because we all now have such a strong visual/historical reference point for the evacuation of Dunkirk, it's easier to place this film's take on the event from a different angle within context. (In some respects, this whole movie is like the fourth story thread of Dunkirk.)

I was a bit surprised by how subdued Joe Wright's work is here. In the Keira Knightley trilogy, not all of his attempts at theatricality worked, but at least those movies didn't feel like the same-old-same-old period piece. Aside from an over-reliance on overhead shots, there isn't nearly as much in the way of visual imagination in Darkest Hour (beyond a generally well-lit, well-mounted production).

This is a tiny thing, but it jumped out at me in a handful of scenes -- the direction of the extras/day-players is way off. A lot of the crowd scenes had me feeling like I was watching actors really trying to get their moment in, rather than realistic crowd dynamics. (The subway sequence is particularly ridiculous.)

As for the movie's most praised element, I'm sorry to say that Gary Oldman's work, though not without solid moments, fell too much on the hamola side for me. I was just constantly aware of the effort involved in every scene -- there's so much shouting, dramatic moving of furniture, and lumbering around, it was hard for me to really be impressed by this transformation because it always felt like a performance. And I realize that Churchill actually spoke this way, but there were a decent number of lines of dialogue I just didn't catch because of all the mumbling.

I don't often like to use the term Oscar-bait as a pejorative, because so many now just use it to describe any mainstream movie with aspirations to seriousness, but this struck me as the kind of movie that really has no point but to win people trophies.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Precious Doll »

I know film industry worldwide has been making them since the beginning of cinema but I'm sick of biopics. Well, all the bad ones anyway.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Okri »

Of course, the worry should be that if Oldman loses like Nolan/The Dark Knight , they change the rules and have a category just for biopic performances - Best Performance by an Actor in an Adapted Leading Role...
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

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Mister Tee wrote:I know I have no claim to being objective about this film, but the reactions I've read online -- especially from the bloggers -- remind me of nothing so much as trained seals, grasping for their meal. People went in saying "Oscar for Oldman", and they came out saying it; what they saw in the interim was close to irrelevant. Sasha Stone essentially rewrote her Theory of Everything review (SPOILER: Oldman BECOMES Churchill!). All these people, who spend 90% of their time moaning about Oscar bait and movies about old white people, are now cheering on primo Oscar bait about old white people.

I said about Eddie Redmayne's Oscar that he won it the day he was cast; should Oldman win, I think the same would be true, and not insignificantly because of the part bloggers have come to play, designating front-runners before a film is even shot, let alone viewed. (Someone at AwardsWatch wrote "Of course; hes been the front-runner all along" -- in the tradition of Unbroken, right?) I have far greater admiration for Oldman and his career than I did for Redmayne, but I so hate this "pre-established narrative trumps achievement" thing that has ruined the Oscars (not to mention the "celebrity impression = great acting" trend) that, in the same way Okri roots for Nolan to fall short in directing once again, I'd be happy to see this film fail in its quest.

However...no questioning Oldman has advantages at this point, though I think a truly dynamic Denzel Washington performance, coupled with his perceived narrow loss last year, would make for strong competition.
Do you really think they will give Denzel a third? It's Churchill after all.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Mister Tee »

I know I have no claim to being objective about this film, but the reactions I've read online -- especially from the bloggers -- remind me of nothing so much as trained seals, grasping for their meal. People went in saying "Oscar for Oldman", and they came out saying it; what they saw in the interim was close to irrelevant. Sasha Stone essentially rewrote her Theory of Everything review (SPOILER: Oldman BECOMES Churchill!). All these people, who spend 90% of their time moaning about Oscar bait and movies about old white people, are now cheering on primo Oscar bait about old white people.

I said about Eddie Redmayne's Oscar that he won it the day he was cast; should Oldman win, I think the same would be true, and not insignificantly because of the part bloggers have come to play, designating front-runners before a film is even shot, let alone viewed. (Someone at AwardsWatch wrote "Of course; hes been the front-runner all along" -- in the tradition of Unbroken, right?) I have far greater admiration for Oldman and his career than I did for Redmayne, but I so hate this "pre-established narrative trumps achievement" thing that has ruined the Oscars (not to mention the "celebrity impression = great acting" trend) that, in the same way Okri roots for Nolan to fall short in directing once again, I'd be happy to see this film fail in its quest.

However...no questioning Oldman has advantages at this point, though I think a truly dynamic Denzel Washington performance, coupled with his perceived narrow loss last year, would make for strong competition.
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Re: Darkest Hour reviews

Post by Precious Doll »

Variety: http://variety.com/2017/film/in-content ... 202545664/

The Wrap: http://www.thewrap.com/darkest-hour-rev ... churchill/

Both rave about Gary Oldman. I'd be happy with Oldman winning if only because he deserved back to back Oscars for Sid & Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears over 30 years ago and is one of the more reliable and constantly good actors around, despite this film having zero appeal to me personally.
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