Killers of the Flower Moon,’ AKA The Dusty, Bloody, Roaring ’20s

October 18, 2023

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Mmm, this one’s a killa (CREDIT: Apple/Paramount Pictures)

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Scott Shepherd

Director: Martin Scorsese

Running Time: 206 Minutes

Rating: R for Disturbingly Widespread and Remorseless Murder

Release Date: October 20, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Here’s an important piece of information that is emphasized right from the get-go in Killers of the Flower Moon: at a certain point in the early 20th century, the Osage were the richest people per capita in the entire world. But where oil flows, bloodshed soon follows. And so it was during the Osage murders that plagued Oklahoma in the 1920s, as detailed in David Grann’s 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon and now the Martin Scorsese-directed adaptation of the same name. All of the action revolves around William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a white man who’s managed to keep all of Osage County in his iron grip. In the course of the long wealth accumulation game that he’s ruthlessly playing, he directs his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to ingratiate himself with the native people. This takes the form of Ernest marrying and starting a family with a local woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). This could all be perfectly wholesome, if only Ernest weren’t involved with his uncle’s schemes to kill pretty much every member of Mollie’s family.

What Made an Impression?: Keeping Your Heart Afloat?: I had one major persistent question throughout Killers of the Flower Moon: could Ernest and Mollie actually be in love with each other? Of course, you don’t have to be in love to get married or to have kids together. But they do seem quite smitten with each other, despite being aware of the treachery afoot. Mollie knows that white men are just romancing the Osage to get their oil money. And Ernest surely knows that she knows. But she nevertheless still considers him as a pretty decent romantic prospect. Partly that’s because she and her sisters don’t really see many other options available for them. When Ernest eventually becomes fully culpable in William’s most murderous machinations, he’s already committed himself to his wife. And it never seems like an act. DiCaprio plays him like someone who never reckons with the moral implications of his behavior. This isn’t remorseless psychopathy. It’s more like family killing family, or friends killing friends, but with so much twisted rationalizing that it’s impossible to remain sane and/or sympathetic.
Shout, Shout, Let It All Out: Once the FBI takes an interest in all the Osage murders, we’re eventually led into a (somewhat) cathartic final act in which William is actually forced to answer for all his deeds in a court of law. Two towering performances in this section are bound to wake you up if you happen to be nodding off at this point. John Lithgow tries to keep things dignified for the prosecution, while Brendan Fraser casts up some fire and brimstone as Hale’s attorney W.S. Hamilton. I can’t help but chuckle at Lithgow whenever he’s in a courtroom, partly because it reminds me of the delightful short-lived NBC sitcom Trial & Error, and partly because his commanding voice is somehow simultaneously both so silly and so reasonable. Fraser meanwhile threatens to knock the entire proceedings off their axis. He’s just as over-the-top as he was in The Whale, but this time it affects me deeper to my core because everyone else is so modulated. These moments feel like being rumbled from a stupor, as all the crimes up to this point have been presented so matter-of-factly.
A Note on the Length: A different version of Killers of the Flower Moon could’ve been 2 hours or so, and it could’ve also been successful, but in a different way than it is now. At 3 hours and 26 minutes, you feel the full weight that goes along with reckoning with this dark chapter in American history. So if you’re planning on seeing it, get a good night’s sleep the day before and pop in some caffeine if you think it will help (but not too much!). And if you’re downing liquid while you’re watching and you don’t want to have to take a bathroom break, then pair it with something like popcorn or pretzel bites so that it won’t go straight through you.

Killers of the Flower Moon is Recommended If You Like: Dad books and Dad movies

Grade: 4 out of 5 Handsome Devils

‘First Cow’ is a Quirky Western About Pop-Up Food Peddling

March 2, 2020

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CREDIT: Allyson Riggs/A24

Starring: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Ewen Bremner, Scott Shepherd, Lily Gladstone, René Auberjonois

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Running Time: 121 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for “Brief Strong Language,” according to the MPAA

Release Date: March 6, 2020 (Limited)

I’m sure there were other cows before the cow in First Cow, but she brings so much sweet satisfaction that she’s sure just as lovely as any actual first cow.

Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King Lu (Orion Lee) meet up and become fast friends on the 19th century Oregon frontier. Their backgrounds are vastly different (Cookie’s originally from Maryland, King’s a Chinese immigrant), but they are nevertheless kindred spirits, bonded by shared drives to make something fulfilling out of their rough terrain. The first third or so of First Cow is rather sleepy, as it mostly consists of Cookie and King wandering through the dark woods. But then they chance upon a bit of a piping-hot business, and suddenly their story is working like gangbusters.

If you’re like me, you might spend a good portion of First Cow wondering, “Where is this cow? I was promised a cow. Let’s get a move on, Mr. Plot!” But patience is a virtue, and if you can indeed be patient, you will be rewarded handsomely, just as Cookie and King are, by writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s steady approach. C and K find the milk-producer just hanging out in a field, and they gather up her cream for all it’s worth. They then slot it in as the key ingredient for a batch of biscuits that they hawk in the middle of town. It tastes unlike anything their customers have ever tasted before, yet it also takes them right back to their childhood kitchen memories. The biscuits sell out immediately day after day the same way that a cupcake pop-up burns through its supply in the hippest part of the neighborhood in 2020.

Cookie and King are always hustling, so I guess we now know what it looked like when you were hustling while stuck out in the woods one hundred-some-odd years ago, or at least we have a satisfying cinematic approximation of what it was like. They certainly have to summon all their wits when they realize that their cow belongs to a wealthy landowner played by Toby Jones who’s been one of their loyal customers. When the jig is up, they find themselves once again out there floating through the coarse landscape. I’m not too experientially familiar with this harsh environment, but I recognize this strain of human existence. Reichardt takes on an interesting, untraditional journey of frustration, satisfaction, and worry bumping against each other. It’s a weird rhythm that I daresay is worth getting in tune with.

First Cow is Recommended If You Like: Toby Jones licking his lips

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Biscuits

Movie Review: ‘Dark Phoenix’ Plays It Way Too Safe by Both X-Men and General Movie Standards

June 5, 2019

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CREDIT: Twentieth Century Fox

Starring: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Jessica Chastain, Tye Sheridan, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Scott Shepherd, Ato Essandoh

Director: Simon Kinberg

Running Time: 114 Minute

Rating: PG-13 for Getting Suddenly Violently Tossed About by Telekinesis

Release Date: June 7, 2019

I love the X-Men. They’re my favorite superhero team, and still, through it all, my favorite superhero movie franchise. They’ve delivered some dizzying cinematic heights but also some flicks that have driven me batty. So it pains me to say that Dark Phoenix did not make me feel much in the way of any strong emotions.

Some say that the X-Men series is burdened by tangled, contradictory continuity. I say it’s bolstered by it. Whereas other cinematic universes are careful to keep every little thread in line for the health of a sturdy timeline, the Merry Mutants traverse decades willy-nilly, tossing off whatever plotlines just aren’t working and cruising along with whatever’s exciting and vibrant, paradoxes be damned! Dark Phoenix doesn’t reject that approach, but it doesn’t embrace it either. It’s mostly content to tell a straightforward story, while occasionally throwing out some half-baked ideas. It’s a movie unstuck in time, instead of proudly giving the middle finger to any temporal concepts.

Dark Phoenix is clearly a labor of love. It’s the directorial debut of Simon Kinberg, who’s been with the franchise for over a decade, and it’s based on one of the most beloved comics storylines, in which telepathic telekinetic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) bonds with a super-hot cosmic force to become the most powerful creature on the planet, perhaps the whole universe. It’s a huge climactic big screen culmination that’s been promised to us for quite some time, but after seeing how it’s turned out, I mainly want to say: we would have been okay without this movie. Or maybe now just wasn’t the right time for it. It’s arriving hot on the heels of an X-Men movie whose title literally referred to the end of the world and another that said a fitting goodbye to a pair of iconic X-characters.

But it shouldn’t have been impossible for Dark Phoenix to be another rousing, revolutionary statement so soon after those conclusive paradigm changes. In fact, it would have totally been in keeping with this franchise’s always-moving-forward ethos. But that’s not going to happen when a climactic battle scene takes place in some random New York hotel or when Professor X and Magneto run through the same old rigamarole of bickering and then making a temporary peace. When the stakes are this high, you have to go for broke.

Dark Phoenix is Recommended If You Like: X-Men completism, if you gotta

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Firebirds