When I read that Nicole Kidman, her eminence, was training to become a death doula, I knew what I had to do: pitch a fake movie. It’s a pitch that goes like this: The economy of Svenborgia, the country only rich people know about, has taken a turn for the worst, and rather than rallying to the cause, the relatively few citizens flee this proverbial sinking ship, causing the Sovereign Prince (Billy Nighy) and Prime Minister (Colman Domingo) to enlist Nicole Kidman (Nicole Kidman) to serve as the Death Doula to an entire nation as it peacefully but lugubriously transitions to dissolution.
How do I phrase this delicately? “Babygirl” begins with Romy (Nicole Kidman), ah, moaning in noisy ecstasy as she and her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), uh, conclude their amorous activity. Kidman’s natural sound effects are so over the top, in fact, that it will undoubtedly prompt a certain of viewer to carp, “C’mon, it sounds like she’s faking it.” A ha! That’s because she is faking it! In the immediate aftermath, she scurries down the hall and, well, shall we say, procures what her spouse could not produce by the light of some seamy footage on her laptop. And away we go, into a movie that might as well exist as something like alternate “Eyes Wide Shut” fan fiction for all the Kidman connoisseurs. Then again, “Eyes Wide Shut” was about a descent into something whereas writer/director Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” proves to be more of an ascent toward something. Climbing orgasm mountain, if I may be so bold, teasing the rare sunny side up erotic thriller, a fascinating that idea that does not entirely come together.
So, what does Romy want in the boudoir? Well, for that we need look no further than the rest of Romy’s life. We see her making breakfast for her two daughters in their pristine penthouse Manhattan apartment and running things as CEO of the successful robotics company she founded, exerting supreme control over every facet of her life. Therefore, it stands to reason that what she carnally craves is a lack of control. Enter: Samuel (Harris Dickinson). A new intern at Romy’s office, he ultimately seems less interested in the company than in her, psychologically probing her, laying the groundwork for some sexual gamesmanship, as if that is his real career, going around to various corporate high-rises as an intern and flirting with CEOs.
Dickinson is good in the role, at least up to a point, with a casual, cocky indifference that plays impeccably off the tightly coiled Kidman, suggesting why these two characters might be such a good match in the bedroom. Kidman uses the revelation that Romy was raised in cults to inform her whole performance, evincing a rigid, pre-programmed air, right down to an extraordinary moment during a scene at an office party where Kidman seems to literalize her character’s dream of an automated world by emitting a laugh that sounds like artificial intelligence. And as Romy and Samuel enter into a dominant-submissive relationship, Romy the character and Kidman the performer fuse in a fascinating way, the character and the actor simultaneously leaning into the fear of embarrassment.
Unfortunately, the character of Samuel never becomes more than something like a manifestation of Romy’s own fantasy, undercutting the ostensible tension that she might be on the verge of blowing her personal and professional life apart. This is furthered in the character of Jacob, who is never a true counterweight, though Banderas wrings incredible pathos from a surprising confrontation near the end. What’s more, the all-important sex scenes, both in turning on Samuel’s, ahem, daddy-like control of his babygirl and how they are rendered so artfully, often existing as mini-music videos, rather than impassionedly uninhibited, seem to suggest a reversion to, if not outright embrace, of Romy’s programmed past, a paradox that either elides Reijn’s script or that she is never able to entirely square. It discolors the happy ending and accompanying would-be empowerment in a strange way, a climax that might mock having it all if it didn’t wind up flattering it.
Nicole Kidman, upon recently receiving the American Film Institute Award for Lifetime Achievement.
A confession: the first time I ever watched a Nicole Kidman movie was because I thought she was cute. The movie was “Billy Bathgate,” and so this was 1991, and so I was 14 years old, and so, please, cut me at least a little slack. I wanted to see Robert Benton’s adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel because one year out from “Goodfellas” every idiot 14-year-old boy was obsessed with mob movies, but also because every commercial they ran for “Billy Bathgate” during college football games and primetime television showed Nicole Kidman at least once and, man, was she pretty. My embarrassing shallowness, however, was evocative of the shallow, and dense, way Hollywood promoted Kidman in the 1990s. The industry saw her as a movie star, but never understood what that meant, never determined what persona they were selling, sort of mingling generic beautiful woman with Tom Cruise’s Other Half, emblemized in forgettable projects like “Malice” (1993) and “Days of Thunder” (1990). There was not a persona to sell, however, because even then Kidman was what she is now, an actor, subsuming herself in roles rather than standing apart from them. She carried her half of “Dead Calm” (1989) as capably as Sam Neill carried his, demonstrated her future propensity for total commitment in “To Die For” (1995), and in “Batman Forever” (1995), quite frankly, went above and beyond the call of duty. Well before Christopher Nolan invested his Dark Knight trilogy with seriousness, Kidman was helping her movie earn its PG-13 rating by conveying (earmuffs!) just how seriously her character wanted to fuck Batman.
If there was a single moment when the broader populace truly became aware of Kidman’s immense ability it was when she donned a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Wolff in “The Hours” (2002), underlined in her winning the Oscar for Best Actress. Kidman is almost always a transformative actor, whether she is changing her appearance or not, but transformation is so much more conspicuous when it’s literal. It was more than that, though, as the invaluable culture writer Anne Helen Petersen wrote in 2017 when assessing Kidman’s career; in playing the part, Kidman “got ugly...Her performance of dowdiness, in other words, is made remarkable by just how unnatural it must have been.” By not being beautiful, Kidman was “proving” she could act for the doofs who somehow did not already realize she could. “With ‘The Hours’ (Kidman) takes another step away from her movie-star persona and firmly becomes an actor playing a role,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote for Salon, proving Petersen’s point even as he gives Kidman a rave, “rather than a celebrity playing herself under a different name.” He continued: “For an actress to give up her face -- her most marketable commodity -- even for one role, is a startling decision.”
In essence, O’Hehir was writing that Kidman had assumed a mask, but the truth was, Kidman had been donning masks her whole career. Emily Nussbaum noted as much for The New Yorker in 2017, writing that Kidman offered not “transparency, (but) a different gift: she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it’s like to hide behind it.” Though she infuses roles with a sense of her own individual ideas about the person she is playing, like essentially imagining Lucille Ball in “Being the Ricardos” as Michael Jordan of “The Last Dance,” Kidman is not playing herself, the crucial delineation. Rather, she conceals herself, a kind of Kidman Kabuki, and like that ancient school of Japanese art, she uses such artifice to transmit emotions of who she is playing directly to the audience.
Yet, in the last few years, a curious thing has happened. In our strange present, where the very idea of what constitutes a movie has become muddled, and big screens and small screens and all the screens in-between have figuratively blurred to the point where it can be difficult to tell them apart, few have managed to carve out a distinct presence across all these spectrums like Kidman. Not just in movies and TV, but social media too, and not just by starting her own Instagram account, but in how her work has been harvested for TikTok and memes. This includes clips of her past roles, of course, like her time-stopping close-up in “The Stepford Wives,” and even her various reactions on talk shows and at awards shows, but I’m thinking even more specifically. I’m thinking, of course, about the AMC Theatres commercial in which Kidman was enlisted in 2021 as an ambassador for the movie multiplex chain to help implore the public to return to movie theaters after the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This commercial has been parodied endlessly, from Olivia Rodrigo on TikTok to Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars to Morgan Freeman at Kidman’s recent AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Crucially, though, Kidman herself is not resorting to self-parody. She is Pure Camp, in the way that Susan Sontag famously saw it, exaggerated, fantastic, passionate, and naive, so deadly serious in effusing such religious grandiosity over the act of going to the movies that it is impossible take seriously. But it’s more. Because she is not playing a character, she is playing herself, except in quotation marks. “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman,’” Sontag wrote. And it is not Kidman, but “Kidman.” It is Nicole Kidman finally becoming a movie star by creating her own persona without, still, having to give her real self away.
Those eyes, those eyes that stare so deep into your soul that you, reader, suddenly feel compelled to leave your deepest, darkest secret in the comments…
…or those feathers from “The Northman” premiere, those feathers that symbolize Nicole Kidman being the first human to independently fly. (Australian authorities deny this flight took place, but I have sources on the ground that confirmed she was in Sydney airspace for roughly 30 seconds.)
Celebrated author Larry McMurtry died last week at the age of 84. Among myriad achievements, he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Lonesome Dove”, no mean feat, though here at Cinema Romantico, a movie blog, we will remember McMurtry for winning Best Screenplay, along with his longtime writing partner Diana Ossana, for “Brokeback Mountain” (2005). More crucially, however, we will remember what McMurtry wore to that 2006 Academy Awards ceremony: bowtie, tuxedo jacket and jeans.
I mean, that takes the Oscar fashion five-layer cake, doesn’t it? What can beat it? When we’re talking Oscar fashion, we’re talking Kirsten Dunst’s dress with pockets, we’re talking Sharon Stone’s Gap t-shirt, and we’re talking Larry McMurtry wearing jeans like he’s rolling into Ruby Tuesday on a Wednesday. Even-
I was about to observe that even Kidman couldn’t pull off jeans to the Oscars. But then I stopped. No disrespect to Mr. McMurtry, of course, obviously, the man wrote “The Last Picture Show”, for God’s sake. But you’re telling me that if Nicole Kidman, her eminence, rolled into the Oscars sporting her “Days of Thunder” look she wouldn’t bring the Dolby Theatre down? We can dream.
Earlier this week it was announced that Nicole Kidman, her eminence, and Javier Bardem would star in Aaron Sorkin’s forthcoming film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. This elicited mounds of casting second-guessing and fair enough. Is Nicole Kidman really the right choice to play Lucille Ball, never mind Lucy Ricardo? Would Anna Faris be better? Debra Messing? Who can say? What I can say, immense Kidman bias accounted for, is this: Nicole Kidman can do anything. She played Ann-Margret in “Any Given Sunday.” You didn’t know that, did you? Nope, I didn’t think you did. As such, the question is not how good Kidman will be in the role (very) or whether the movie itself will be psychologically astute or prestige-y drivel but, in the wake of tackling the sitcom’s greatest leading lady after already starring in a movie version of “Bewitched”, what TV show will Kidman bring to the silver screen next?
A few ideas:
Remington Steele
Queen Latifah is bringing Robert McCall back to life as Robyn McCall so why not give Hollywood’s other Queen the chance to resurrect Laura Holt? You could even have Pierce Brosnan reprise his role as the eponymous thief. {Blinks.} I just saw the poster.
Soap
“Soapdish”, I guess, was kind of an indirect version of the 70s afternoon soap opera spoof. But it didn’t star Nicole Kidman. And Nicole Kidman was made to spoof the daytime soaps. “The Paperboy” meets “The Bold and the Beautiful.” The second Oscar should be imminent.
Laverne & Shirley
Did you know that Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts, B.F.F.s, have not starred together in a movie since 1991? That’s pre-Clinton Administration! If we can’t have Nicole & Naomi getting into hijinks around Melbourne then let’s have them get into hijinks in Milwaukee! No? Have I crossed the sitcom sacrosanct line? Fine, if Nicole Kidman as Laverne DeFazio and Naomi Watts as Shirley Feeney is too heretical then we will just…
Kate & Allie
…cast Naomi Watts as Kate McArdle and Nicole Kidman as Allie Lowell. You’re welcome!
The Flying Nun
As mentioned, her eminence already has a “Bewitched” movie, though it remains one of the few Kidman movies I have not seen, and so we will have to translate “The Flying Nun” to the big screen instead. What was “The Flying Nun” even about? No idea. Doesn’t matter. Jan de Bont hasn’t directed a movie since 2003. Let’s enlist him and turn this “Flying Nun”’ into an action-thriller, balancing poverty and chastity with broom chases and pyrotechnics and watch those sweet, sweet bucks roll in.
Newhart / The Bob Newhart Show
A crossover between Bob Newhart’s 1970s CBS sitcom set in Chicago and Bob Newhart’s 1980s CBS sitcom set in Vermont in which, after the latter’s famous It Was Just A Dream series conclusion where he woke up in the former’s reality, finds Joanna Loudon (Kidman) winding her way through the space time continuum to exact revenge for being left to run the damn inn alone, sort of Newhart as Cronenberg.
Valerie’s Family
You will remember that “Valerie’s Family” was rechristened “The Hogan Family” after its star Valerie Harper left the show due to a salary dispute and a subsequent court battle. To make way for the new version of the show, Harper’s character was killed off in an auto accident. …… But what if she wasn’t? What if the auto accident was staged by Sandy Hogan (Carrie-Ann Moss) – née Sandy Raskopf – to get her hooks on Valerie’s Family and now Valerie is out to get her family back by settling the score?
D.C. Follies
As a District bartender surrounded by puppet caricatures of Presidents and other political and cultural figures, Nicole Kidman will not just sling drinks while playing the human straight woman in our cinematic version. No, no, no, no, no. She will uncover a political conspiracy being hatched over so many draft beers; “The Parallax View” with puppets.
“Part of the journey is the end.” – Tony Stark, Avengers: Endgame (2019) “As if!” – Cher Horowitz, Clueless (1995)
Last week the first trailer for the [editor: plz confirm # of spider-man movies i don’t have the energy to look it up] “Spider-Man” movie, “Spider-Man: Far From Home” was released. Jon Watts’s movie is apparently set in a post-“Avengers: Endgame” universe which simply amazes me because it means, apparently, that the Endgame really wasn’t the Endgame which was the only “Endgame” theory I had all along. And if you thought “Spider-Man: Far From Home” was going to be the Endgame that “Endgame” wasn’t then you were probably surprised when Budweiser doubled down with Bud Light. Indeed, the trailer features a scene in which Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, sort of “Mighty Aphrodite’s” Greek Chorus for the MCU (Marvel Comic Universe), explains that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is from an alternate dimension to which Spider-Man née Peter Parker replies: “Are you saying there’s a multiverse?” Gawd. Whatta move. It made me think of the moment in “Risen” when Joseph Fienne’s Roman military tribune hears of this Jesus guy’s promise of eternal life and mutters “What a marvelous recruiting tool.” The MCU is eternal movie life! It never ever dies! I mean, they really are gonna milk this thing into the year 9595. Movies are dead; the MCU has risen.
I don’t mean to begrudge Marvel fans their “Avengers” love. Truly, I don’t, despite all the pseudo-pithy comments made here and in the past. I saw an old friend from high school post a lovely tribute on Facebook to “Avengers: Endgame” and the twenty-one movies preceding it and how they brought his family together throughout, echoing Maya Phillips's reckoning with the Marvel movie universe at The New Yorker when she wrote how “(t)he narrative worth caring about becomes the story of one’s own interaction with the M.C.U.” Just as I argue for and defend a critic’s inalienable right to an aesthetic appraisal of any film, large or small, and strenuously object to any Rotten Tomatoes-addled eggheads who erroneously contend such appraisals somehow constitute a refusal to “let people enjoy things”, I hold holy a fan’s right to form totally partial, overly emotional attachments with works of art they truly love. I am sometimes a critic, sometimes a fan, just a fan with a little more arthouse DNA, which is why I blog before you today not to say stop this cinematic cross promotion, since you can’t stop what’s already here, but simply ask that if this is to be our present and future then it’s only right to afford fair and equal multiverses.
And that is why, loyal frustrated followers, random, confused readers, and Hollywood, to ask, on behalf of my artsy fartsy acolytes, many of whom are fanboys and fangirls of a different sort, worshiping at the chic altar of another superhero, for a Nicole Kidman multiverse.
Kidman has superhero movie experience, of course, appearing in “Batman Forever” and so why can’t Millicent Clyde take a portal from “Paddington” to there? Millicent Clyde, evil taxidermist extraordinaire, would stuff and mount the Batman and his bird-brained bro and then admire them in her tony London flat while sipping Pimms and lemonade (and telling The Riddler, in that peerless way Kidman can imperiously reproach, that riddles are for children, leaving him to toddle off with his cane between his legs, never to be heard from again). That’s the superhero movie the Kidman Krew wants to see!
Why can’t the darkly transcendental ending of “Destroyer” not really have been the ending but Erin Bell gaining access to the Dogville, Colorado dimension where she proceeds to put us out of our misery by putting Lars von Trier out of his thereby blowing up the von Trier-verse and retroactively wiping our minds of any von Trier movies we might have seen?
Why can’t Suzanne Stone get alternate dimensionally air-dropped into that yacht in the middle of Pacific in “Dead Calm”? Can you imagine Suzanne Stone going toe-to-toe with Psycho Billy Zane?
Charlotte Bless should be in every movie, if only just in the background somewhere.
Why can’t there be a parallel universe where Virginia Woolf is married to Kyle Miller in “Trespass” not simply so we could see Virginia Woolf sagely observing her way through a home invasion but so we could see Virginia Woolf married to Nicolas Cage? WHAT SORT OF BLOCKHEAD WOULDN’T WANT TO SEE THIS?
And what if – go with me here – Dr. Claire Lewicki was, via the Nicole Kidman Multiverse, able to rip a hole in the “Days of Thunder” universe to follow Cole Trickle through to the “M:I” universe to finally, once and for all, settle the score with you-know-who. It’d be like Kerrigan v Harding but for the big screen which sounds to me like a pitch that would make the marketing suits who think creativity is just a synonym for synergy salivate.
Before talking about anything we have to talk about the wig. It’s a wig Nicole Kidman wears in “Destroyer” as Erin Bell, an L.A. detective who’s not so much burned out as down and out. The wig is hideous. It does not appear carefully situated atop her head so much as unceremoniously dropped there, truly accentuating her I-Was-Just-Sleeping-In-The-Car countenance. And the wig impeccably matches the scraggly makeup design, both of which turn Bell into something akin to The Walking Dead, accentuated by Kidman’s zombie-ish walk, where she genuinely seems to be dragging herself forward. But “Destroyer” also makes room for flashbacks of Bell’s younger self which cleverly allows for Kidman to undergo two actorly transitions since her character is under deep cover and she has to go sort of heroine chic to blend in amidst bank robbing druggies. Actor vanity or not, Kidman is never asking to be liked. God, no, and neither is writer/director Karyn Kusama interested if you enjoy “Destroyer” in that popcorn munching kind of way. If many movies fail to manage tone, “Destroyer” does not, seeing its tone right through to the end – bleak, it is very, very bleak.
Kusama elicits that bleak tone through atmosphere. If there are nighttime scenes, there are just as many set during the day, a noir trading shadows for the hot sun. And if Kidman’s makeup makes it seems as if her character’s skin is rotting then the sun only intensifies this sensation, leaving her wholly exposed, not just to those deadly solar rays but symbolically to her own sins. The living spaces we see are generally portrayed as either trashy or virtually uninhabitable, and the Los Angeles Kusama sees through the lens is less the sprawling cool city of Michael Mann than the small city in a large desert, as the late Roger Ebert deemed it, of “Chinatown.” The primo action sequence stretches not through downtown or across city streets in sleek cars but on foot through back alleys, all of which feel purposely un-populated, truly evincing the sense of L.A.’s vastness and making it seem as if this story is happening not at the heart of things but on the edge of the world. An earlier foot chase under cover of darkness concludes with Bell and the pursued out of breath and looking out over Dodger Stadium, a whole other world a whole world away.
The story itself, however, which involves a nefarious dude from Bell’s past returning to wreck her present, leaves something to be desired. Though the flashbacks contend she gets in too deep, we never quite feel exactly why, as Bell’s falling for her fellow undercover operative (Sebastian Stan) is the one detail into which Kidman struggles to breathe life, making it come across as a mere plot point for multiple reasons, including a twist that might have meant more had their affair earned more credibility. Yet if this makes it seem as if Kusama’s jumping back and forth between present and past is intended to cover up for the rote narrative, it also literalizes the idea of Erin plunging into her own past, given great weight by triggering flashbacks with mammoth close-ups of Erin, as if she is really going back to those places in her mind where she made one wrong decision and now is obligated to pay for with the rest of her life.
In the end, “Destroyer” is not a procedural so much as penance. Bell is no supercop, constantly getting the crap kicked out of her, and the relationship with her daughter, involved with an insufferable boyfriend, is played like something she is made to suffer. Even the climactic confrontation is intentionally doused of its traditional impact. In another movie, the conclusion’s nigh mysticism might have suggested redemption; here it just suggests wishful thinking.
This month is April, which means last month was March, and because it was March, a month dominated by March Madness™ wherein college basketball teams are slotted into a big bracket and made to square off until a champion emerges at month’s end, every content farm on the Internet was stricken with the need to create its own kind of bracket, usually pop culture related, and usually while stipulating that they, like, totally wouldn’t be doing a bracket, man, if culture did not, you know, demand it. These brackets ran the gamut from weirdly arcane (Best Fake Drive-By Truckers song titles, won by “The Summer of Gin & Fried Chicken”) to distressingly banal (Best Brands, won by Häagen-Dazs) to shockingly specific (Best Non-US Capitals Everyone Thinks Are Capitals, won, in a mild upset, by Birmingham, Alabama) to predictably ironic (Definitive Bracket of Pop Culture Brackets, over at Vox, which we are not linking to because c’mon).
Astute readers may notice that Cinema Romantico did not participate in all this bracket madness. This was not necessarily because our blog is above such content bandwagon jumping, not at all, but because, well, like the Villanova Wildcats of the New Big East dispatched teams with such ease throughout real March Madness™ that they essentially rendered the massive bracket as immaterial to their spectacular sharpshooting conquest, this blog’s pop culture bracket had such a foregone victor that pitting others against her was a waste of everyone’s time. Some might say, “Doesn’t that mean your pop culture tournament was rigged?” To which we say, “The universe rigged our pop culture tournament for us.” Even we are not above the universe’s decrees.
So, we congratulate the winner of our pop culture tournament that was never contested because it was over before it was, Nicole Kidman of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” They say the Queen’s Birthday is April 21st, but Cinema Romantico toasts its Queen today.
It’s Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving is the time here in these quasi-United States when we are not so much happily willing to give thanks for our many blessings as OBLIGATED to give thanks for our many blessings dammit, as our nation’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda cheerily reminded us on Monday. And Cinema Romantico can think of fewer blessings more exultant than reaction shots and Nicole Kidman. Each of these blessings is exultant on its own, of course, but they are that much better when rolled into one, like they were earlier in 2017 on an episode of Ellen when Giada De Laurentiis, Food Network’s own, was enlisted to show the titular host and her most prominent guest that episode, Kidman, how to concoct fennel and clementine pizza.
It, uh, did not go well. And on a day where everyone sits down to give thanks just before stuffing themselves with scrumptious food, well, we here at Cinema Romantico would like to give thanks for a bout of food that wasn’t so scrumptious, as Ms. Kidman, her eminence, memorably demonstrated with the greatest reaction shot of 2017, perhaps of the new century.
In a year where so much of everything to a person of a certain disposition has been awful, and so many seem totally fine with everything being awful — and getting more awful still by the day, hour, minute, tweet — just so long as they get to laugh and point at people of a certain disposition feeling sorrow toward this unfolding calamity, your as-ever astonishing artistry, Ms. Kidman, in communicating to the whole wide world how that bite of food you just ate was awful to the extreme became nothing short of the ultimate blessing. Thank you.
The 70th annual Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last week. Movies were screened and whatever. We here at Cinema Romantico have never been big festival-goers as we prefer to see fewer films at a time and ruminate on the films we see a little longer. Critical rumination has no place at a festival, of course, at least not for critics, whose obligation is to see and then instantly spew, getting to Twitter FIRST with their capsule cum review, not only diagnosing what might not have even settled in their minds but providing fuel for headlines which too often these days comes across like the most valuable currency in movie discourse. It’s a real shame. Still, for all the unfortunate aspects of film festivals, this blog will never deny our affection for the frivolous bliss of Cannes, which is really all that should matter, and which is what reviewers in their spew should cop to straight away, an ecosphere of silver screen endorphins intended to yield euphoria rather than analysis.
As such, it is in that euphoric state that Cinema Romantico, from the cozy confines of its couch, where we spent our time observing Cannes from afar due to the traditional confluence of the Big 10 Track & Field Championships and the fact that the only outlet willing to grant us accreditation was Horse & Hound, officially bestow our famously un-exalted Brûlé Palme, this blog’s variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico’s favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee. Past winners include Kylie Minogue, Bill Murray and Kristen Stewart, and while this year’s recipient of Cinema Romantico’s non-notable Brûlé Palme is, if you have followed this blog for any length of time, or simply seen our Twitter avatar, incredibly foregone, that is, in so many ways, keeping with the festival attitude of mostly going to re-confirm your biases.
That is to say, the winner of this year’s quite insignificant Brûlé Palme is Nicole Kidman.
The what’s-that-then? Brûlé Palme goes to Nicole Kidman because Ms. Kidman, just as she so ably toggles between countless character types, played all Five Roles of Festival Attendee to remarkable precision.
She went alone.
She blended into an ensemble.
She attended with her significant other, humbly accepting his (rightful) deference.
While we could debate favorite comic book heroes all day, I've always been partial, as many know, to Hōkūlani, of Oceanic Comics fame. You might remember her origin story..... born June 20th 1967, the same night as the once-in-a-world colossus moon, big sister to the super moon, which pulled the tides and caused flooding in the hospital where Hōkūlani was born, momentarily ensconcing her in the rushing waters before she was rushed to safety. Her family retreated with the newborn baby up nearby Kilohana Hill, named for the Hawaiian goddess of expression and ingenuity, where a shift in tectonic plates, also brought about by the colossus moon, caused the long dormant volcano of Kilohana Hill to seep lava. That lava infused Hōkūlani with heat that mixed with the chill of the Pacific's water, meaning that Hōkūlani, when able to hone her skills in full, could flip from immense passion to coolest of the cool in an instant, faster than any before her, and with great conviction. And many years later, after Hōkūlani had defeated the evil megalomaniacal villain Thetan, who tried to appropriate her superpowers for his own selfish gain, she reclaimed them as her own, allowing them to shine, to shine as brightly as the Heavenly Star for which she was named. She had no peer. She has no peer. She is invincible in her expressiveness, awe-inspiring in her radiance and wears a cape with silver moons to honor the colossus which bequeathed upon her such immense power.
You probably know her best, however, as her alter ego.....Nicole Kidman.
Set in the intimidating Australian outback, where heat pulverizes and dust storms beckon, “Strangerland’s” title would seem to emblemize the plight of the Parker family, who as the film opens have moved to a nowhere hamlet for vague reasons that become clear when Catherine (Nicole Kidman) and Matthew’s (Joseph Fiennes) two children, fifteen year old Lily (Maddison Brown) and her younger brother Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton), disappear. What follows is a curious hybrid of an elemental procedural in the vein of “Prisoners” and the esoteric atmospherics of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” If it leans toward the latter as it reaches the conclusion, it tends more toward the former throughout, which makes for a curious experience where a deliberate pace is at odds with the urgency of the quest. Still, it works, if only because the search eventually comes beside the point as “Strangerland” transforms into a compelling nightmare where a mother tries following her daughter into the same ineffable void.
The film is rife with red herrings in the form of otherwise well-acted supporting characters, mere pieces in an Agatha Christie-ish puzzle meant to drum up drama and draw out suspense. Once we get the obligatory bad vibes of the Parker household out of the way, we are introduced to a strapping lothario at a skate park with an ominous tattoo who is sweet on Lily. We meet the Parkers’ aboriginal house painter, Burtie (Meyne Wyatt), who is also sweet on Lily. He doubles as the son of the woman dating Detective Rae (Hugo Weaving) who is tasked with leading the search to find the missing kids, a conflict of interest that is addressed without any genuine follow-through. There is also Lily’s former teacher in another town with whom she had an illicit relationship, the same guy Matthew beat to within an inch of his life, and this streak of anger in Lily’s father even seems to peg dad as suspicious. It could be anyone!
Who knows, and I’m not entirely sure director Kim Farrant even cares. After all, the movie shows us Lily and Tommy striking out of their own volition, a moment seen from the vantage point of Matthew who merely stands back and lets it happen. Why is never precisely explicated, at least not until the end, a dishonest withholding of information intended to make us go “hmmmmm.” Yet in and of itself the moment seems to suggest something more. Tommy is shown “walking” as the movie opens, at night, all alone, and though his parents scold him they also seem lax in doing much to stop him, as if admitting whatever their children need to walk the straight and narrow isn’t something they can provide.
Frankly, Tommy isn’t much more than a plot device, made to vanish and then used at another point in the film to theoretically kick up the suspense an extra notch. And the character of Matthew disappears down the rabbit hole of rage, as if the movie doesn’t know quite what to do with hm. Catherine, however, is “Strangerland’s” spirit animal, and Kidman, as Kidman will, goes for broke in a wildly affecting performance of an unnerved mother made to square with the fact that she may well have passed onto Lily the very genes that would have prompted her daughter to just up and walk out.
While Lily gets little screen time, defined by a bit of conveniently backstory-laden dialogue and a mouth-breather on the phone who calls her a naughty word, we still get to know her quite well, and that’s because Farrant draws Catherine as Lily. More than once, daughter is referenced as being a chip off her mom’s apparently promiscuous block. As she unravels, Catherine indulges in seemingly emotion-free physical cravings, with her husband and other people, an evocation of that naughty word Lily is called.
In one scene, Catherine desperately ransacks Lily’s room for clues, coming upon a diary. She sits down on her daughter’s bed and combs through it, and the way Kidman positions herself, legs curled up, sitting in a bed that’s too small for her in that colorfully decorated room, she is essentially reverting to childlike behavior. Later, she puts on Lily’s shirt, turns up her music, and when Burtie turns up at the door, an extremely discomforting sequence of sorta-seduction follows. It’s like she's trying to will her daughter back to life in the form of herself, and even if its conveyance in this sequence is almost too literal, Kidman evinces it with such a bonkers emotionalism that it’s difficult not to feel the very real pain bubbling beneath her breakdown. Wherever she went, Lily’s not coming back. In her own way, neither is Catherine.
Since no one else in Hollywood seems interested in so obviously putting Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts, friends-4-life, in their own buddy cop comedy we here at Cinema Romantico have decided to take it upon ourselves...
Fair Dinkum is a buddy cop comedy about two at-odds police detectives, a Sydneysider, Ardagh (Nicole Kidman), and a Melbournian, Hartigan (Naomi Watts), who must work through their contradictory attitudes and approaches to the job when they find themselves stranded in western Australia during The Wet and must siphon through an entire town's residency, Agatha Christie-style, to unmask a killer.
It was recently announced that Nicole Kidman’s “Grace of Monaco”, which debuted at Cannes last year to an international roar of rejection and laughter and promptly fell off the release radar, will make its debut on Lifetime. Essentially this is a straight-to-DVD release except worse because usually no one even notices straight-to-DVD movies aside from when they are browsing Blockbuster shelves which, of course, can’t happen because there are no more Blockbuster shelves.
It’s a harsh hand dealt to her eminence, Ms. Kidman, and yet…..noted Entertainment physicist Peterson M. Gerund has long contended that Television and Cinema are, in fact, parallel universes and that a choice made in one universe might very well yield a different outcomes in the other universe. “In this universe,” Mr. Gerund explained when we reached him by phone at his home in Pasadena, “the outcome is airing it on Lifetime. But in the parallel universe of Cinema it’s entirely possible that ‘Grace of Monaco’ was a rip-roaring success and Ms. Kidman won an Oscar.”
So there you have it. In a parallel universe Nicole Kidman probably won an Oscar for “Grace of Monaco”. We salute her.
Nicole Kidman, two-time Oscar winner when counting parallel universes.
The news broke this past week – The Weinstein Company is moving the Nicole Kidman Grace Kelly biopic “Grace of Monaco” to 2014. And with the move went Cinema Romantico’s meaningless prediction that the impeccable Ms. Kidman would win this year’s Best Actress Oscar. Thus, with Oscar season swiftly approaching, it is time for us to re-evaluate the field and predict a new victor.
The obvious choice would be Kate Winslet for “Labor Day.” She is 1.) Is gunning for her 2nd statue just like Ms. Kidman and 2.) My Favorite Actress. But #2 is precisely why I can’t pick her. I already jinxed Nicole and got her movie moved, I won’t dare cast the jinx on Kate The Great.
Once upon an English lawn Naomi Watts – Ms. Kidman’s consigliere – was seen as a surefire contender for her work as Diana (Princess, that is) in “Diana” but the reviews for that film would make Uwe Boll blush.
Berenice Bejo has been getting serious buzz for “The Past” but, come on, it’s French! Like the Academy’s going to see that one! (Reader: “But ‘The Artist’ won Best Picture!” Cinema Romantico: “That’s because it was silent and set in Hollywood! They didn’t know it was French!”)
There has been significant scuttlebutt surrounding Cate Blanchett for her sadistic turn in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” but that film was released in August. August!!! August is like the 1990’s to an Academy voter! By the time Oscar ballots roll around the voters will be up to their ears in “Last Vegas” DVD screeners. Speaking of which…
Mary Steenburgen – mark my words – is going to steal “Last Vegas” right out from under all those imposters. Not that the Academy will notice. And not that I will notice (since I probably won’t see it).
The Academy may be unaware this performance actually exists. Our sources would neither confirm nor deny.
I’ve already started plastering Academy members doors with Rooney Mara In “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” flyers but most Academy members then just storm outside and tell me to get off their lawn and then mumble something about Judi Dench’s new movie.
Jennifer Lawrence is well on her way to being the Academy’s new Christoph Waltz but the new “Hunger Games” is too big budgetish.
Rose Byrne will probably cancel herself out between “The Internship” and “Insidious 2.”
Lake Bell in “In A World…” would be a game-changer but, uh, hey, isn’t, like, Meryl Streep in a movie again this fall?
Reader: “Hold it…”
Shailene Woodley was resplendent in “The Spectacular Now.” But, of course, the Academy has no idea who she is.
Reader: “Wait, wait, wait…”
Will Cameron Diaz's back tattoo in "The Counselor" have what it takes to score a Best Actress nod?
I personally feel like Cameron Diaz’s Back Tattoo in “The Counselor” should be in contention but feel those odds are long.
Reader: “Oh God…”
Malin Akerman is Debbie Harry in “CBGB” but that evokes Supporting Performance.
Reader: “Stop! I see what’s happening here! You’re going through the entire list, ruling out everybody, so that in the end you’re only left with……” Reader #2: “Left with who?” Reader: “Lady Gaga in ‘Machete Kills!’ This entire post was a set-up! WE'VE BEEN HAD!” Reader #2: “Run! Run outta the room! Shut your laptops and run! Everybody!!! There’s still time! If we don’t hear it, he didn’t say it!”
David Thomson is by far my favorite non-everyday film critic. No one sees the cinema nor writes about the cinema in quite the same way as him, which is among the highest compliments one can bestow upon a writer of any format. I had long held the impression his ostensible biography of Nicole Kidman was mere trash, a mash note, a love letter extended over nearly 300 pages. This notion, as I should have known all along, was utterly mis-held.
It is not a true biography at all. Rather it is a fascinating, hilarious and really, really strange look not simply at the exemplary career of Ms. Kidman as an actress but as her place in the culture as a celebrity. I won't even tell you where he goes with his chapter on Nicole's Chanel No. 5 ad. Only Thomson, man.
Thomson's prose never fails to routinely leave me joyfully reeling, looking up from the page for a minute or two to ruminate on some sentence (or series of them). One passage in particular from "Nicole Kidman" that was not even about Nicole Kidman knocked off my proverbial reading glasses. I loved it. I loved every word of it. I have included the passage verbatim below and will offer no context nor commentary. I simply offer it for you to read and consider.
"And here we come to a remarkable and distressing paradox in the American or the mainstream movie: that while the medium is founded on fantasy involvement, still so much of its material is held up to to short-sighted and depleting schemes of what is plausible. The audience, the customers, have always gone to see movies to make an imaginative journey - that of rising from their seats in the dark and going up to exist on the bright screen, in the sublimity of heightened behavior. But as if we're ashamed of yielding so much to the fanciful in America, we then go to great neurotic lengths to persuade ourselves that the action of movies is 'plausible.' And so the medium is innately dreamlike, while the content is ostensibly photographic and lifelike. Thus, we hope, we keep faith with our existence as a hardworking, rational, scientifically minded, capitalist culture - as opposed to people living in dream."
At this year's edition of the swank soiree known as the Cannes International Film Festival, the impeccable Nicole Kidman stoked (ah?) a moderate cultural furor with her hair choice for a walk along the red carpet. The choice begged the question: did Nicole rip off Lindsay Bluth Fünke?
Two reporters with The Miami Times, Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) and Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), have come to a prison in swampy, muggy Florida to meet Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), trapped on death row for the murder of a local sheriff. They plan to investigate his claim of innocence and an unexplored alibi the night of the killing. They have brought with them Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman). She has been corresponding with Van Wetter and the two of them, despite having never met face to face until this moment, have agreed to marry.
Ward and Yardley have pertinent questions for Van Wetter. Van Wetter ignores them. He is only interested in his bride to be. Alas, this is prison and, as "Arrested Development" taught us, there is “no touching” in prison and, thus, Van Wetter is denied the tangible something that he so desperately craves. But he won’t be denied. Neither will she. And so they engage in, shall we say, explicit eye-to-eye erotica. Make no mistake, it is lewd and graphic, but it also electrifying and bodacious. And it speaks to the intent of director Lee Daniels’ film, steamy Floridian trash with extra pulp.
Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, who wrote the screenplay with Daniels, "The Paperboy’s" jumping off point contains the DNA of a thousand wrongly accused crime thrillers, but this is, above all, a steamy, screwy soap opera. It has no interest in legal proceedings or “the truth”, willingly trading in the thrust of a pointed overall arc for an insistence on atmosphere and the individual moment. This causes it to suffer in the homestretch but it’s not fatal and, anyway, this is a film you look at, not a film you think about. You will be hard pressed to recall the name of the dead sheriff setting things in motion but hell be damn sure you will remember the remedy for a jellyfish sting.
Although the narrator of the story is the Jansen family’s black maid (Macy Gracy), the audience’s entry point to the whole sordid mess is Jack (Zac Efron), a college dropout working as a driver for Ward, his older brother, as he and Yardley skit about the area to snoop out the story. Jack, aimless, seems uninterested in women his own age, having eyes for Charlotte right away, questioning her engagement to a convicted killer, vowing to protect her. "The Paperboy" seems to be, in its off-kilter way, about Jack’s loss of innocence and his first true love.
Many of the characters here are not quite what they seem at first. Van Wetter is built up as being a Man Done Wrong, until we meet him at which point we realize it hardly matters whether or not he did the wrong of which he was convicted (though we suspect he probably did). He is a creepy, grimy, sinister man, and anyone with pure motives would likely leave him to rot. Ah, but the two intrepid reporters, both stashing secrets, turn out to be less intrepid than self-interested, knowing full well a story this highly charged could be lucrative for their careers. Only Jack and Charlotte seem to refrain from hiding twists up their sleeves.
Charlotte, with the whacked-out wig, enormous eyelashes and skintight attire, may look fake on the outside, like a plastic Barbie Doll, but the always impeccable, ever fearless Kidman magnetically outfits this Barbie Doll with a beating heart – even if that heartbeat distinctly sounds of massive emotional instability and a taste for the furthest reaches of the edge. In this case the clothes don’t make the woman. The woman wears those clothes because that’s who the woman is. She doesn’t even try to downplay or deny her desire to sleep around because, hey, that’s just human nature. This is what alternately angers and attracts Jack and sets him on the path as her self-appointed savior.
Whether anyone in this heinous southern outpost is worth saving is debatable. These characters conjured thoughts of a man dangling his foot over a swamp, taunting the gators lurking in the murk below. You get what you ask for.
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