Emma Thompson

Good Luck to You, Dick Avery

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The COVID-era two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a little self-conscious & stagebound, but it’s also an admirably thoughtful, vulnerable drama for adults.  Despite its obvious production limitations—mostly isolated to two actors verbally sparring in a single hotel room—it feels substantial enough to make you wonder why the Disney subsidiary Searchlight dumped it directly into the Hulu stream instead of giving it a proper theatrical push.  Maybe it’s because it’s the rare Nancy Meyers/Nora Ephron style romcom that’s too saucy to watch with your mom, considering how lengthy & girthy its discussions of geriatric sexual pleasure can be.  Or maybe the star power of its sole household name, Emma Thompson, wasn’t bright enough to guarantee box office success in America (as opposed to the UK, where it has been in the Top 10 box office chart for weeks).  The movie wouldn’t be much without her, though, if it would exist at all.  Screenwriter Katy Brand wrote the main role with Thompson in mind, and the actor makes herself incredibly vulnerable for the part as a widow who hires a young, ripped sex worker (Daryl McCormack, the titular Leo Grande) to help her achieve her very first orgasm.  Thompson’s commitment & fearlessness in the part are unquestionable, but I do wonder what the film might’ve been like if the lead actor wasn’t so Movie Star beautiful.  I don’t want to say that her tightly wound neuroses about her aging body came across as phony, exactly, since low self-esteem can (and does) hit anyone & everyone.  I do think the movie plays it safe by hanging those neuroses off such a gorgeous, glamorous lead, though, even when she’s standing naked in the mirror, exposing all her body’s “flaws” for the audience’s scrutiny.

The reason I’m reluctant to call Thompson’s self-esteem struggle in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande “phony” is because I happened to watch a film this week that exemplifies exactly what phoniness would look like in that context.  The 1957 Stanley Donen rom-com Funny Face has a lot of glaring faults, not least of all the fact that it’s a musical with exactly one good song (“Think Pink”, a sequence I’ve already seen parodied beautifully in Derek Jarman’s arthouse whatsit The Garden).  It’s also packed with so much high-art Technicolor fashion photography—highlighting the artistry of costume designer Edith Head & couturier Hubert de Givenchy—that those faults hardly matter at all.  It’s a film built entirely on phoniness, most notably in the preposterous romance between Audrey Hepburn as a bookworm philosopher & the much older Fred Astaire as a Richard Avedon-type fashion photographer.  Astaire negs Hepburn throughout the film, mocking her academic interests in the philosophy of “Impracticalism” (a sentiment the movie shares) and, more dubiously, for her looks (a sentiment no one shares).  It’s presented as a preposterous prospect that the “mousy,” “boyish,” “Peter Pan”-like Hepburn could become a high-price fashion model. Even the title “Funny Face” is a reference to her “unconventional” attractiveness, when that exact face has since kept the dorm room poster industry afloat for over half a century.  Funny Face is enjoyable enough as a proto-Devil Wears Prada fantasy where an unfashionable bookworm accidentally falls upward to the top of the fashion industry (I’ll let you determine where Hepburn getting forcibly stripped out of her homely bookstore clothes by a room full of rabid fashion models fits in that fantasy), but it is unquestionably, 1000% phony, mostly because of who it cast in that central role as the “homely” academic-turned-model.

The age-gap intimacy of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is much more authentic than the Old Hollywood phoniness of Funny Face.  Thompson’s lonely widow is only unattractive in her own mind, where she beats herself up as a hideous troll & a “seedy old pervert” who needs to pay for satisfying sex.  Her by-the-hour lover is shown to be similarly self-conscious, despite being a younger, gym-bodied smokeshow.  Before & during each of their hotel room trysts, the two main players are shown primping themselves in separate mirrors, nervous about how their physical bodies will be perceived by their sex partners.  I just still think there’s something weirdly cautious about casting someone as glamorous as Thompson in that central role.  Just as Hepburn did not have anything that could be reasonably called “a funny face”, Thompson meets a high Movie Industry beauty standard that prevents her from coming across as an everyday everywoman.  Surely, part of the point of Good Luck to You Leo Grande is about how badly she needs to climb out of her own head, since most of her paid-sex sessions qualify more as talk therapy than they do physical intimacy.  I just wonder if the film might’ve had more impact if someone less remarkable had been cast in Thompson’s role, someone the average audience could more closely relate to.  Considering how shallow the distribution already was for the film even with a movie star at the helm, though, it’s unlikely that it would’ve ever made it past the festival circuit under those conditions.  And, hey, Thompson is a talented actor who can carry a scene with ease, so it’s probably for the best that it was written with her in mind.

As a quick aside, I want to note that phoniness isn’t an automatic dealbreaker.  These two movies are hardly comparable, but I will admit that I’m much more likely to rewatch the glaringly flawed, intensely phony Funny Face in the future than I am to revisit the small-stakes, intimate authenticity of Good Luck to You Leo Grande.  For all of Funny Face‘s faults, watching Hepburn pose in all those gorgeous Givenchy outfits around Paris reaches momentary heights that no raw, vulnerable intimacy Thompson achieves in that closed-off hotel room set ever could.  Hollywood fantasy is a powerful drug, and I’m apparently willing to put up with a lot of phoniness to chase that high.

-Brandon Ledet

Cruella (2021)

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So far, I’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding Disney’s live-action reheats of its own stale leftovers.  2019’s Lion King, 2017’s Beauty and the Beast, and 2015’s Cinderella have all been massive commercial successes for America’s favorite Evil Corporation, but I personally don’t understand their appeal.  Why would I want to see the expressive, imaginative artistry of animation classics re-interpreted in lifeless, colorless CGI?  If I ever catch myself feeling pangs of nostalgia for Aladdin, Dumbo, or The Jungle Book, the original works are just one library loan away – no substitutes necessary.  Unfortunately, my resolve to avoid Disney’s de-animated retreads is much weaker when it comes to the spotlight origin stories for their classic villainesses.  In 2014, I somehow found myself watching the de-animated prequel Maleficent in a near-empty multiplex, and this year I was helpless but to repeat the ritual (from the safety of my couch) with its spiritual successor, Cruella.  Neither movie is especially terrible (nor especially great), but do I resent that I got sucked into their middling orbits.  The Disney marketing machine comes for us all eventually, and my personal weakness as a potential mark is apparently misbehaved women who toe the line between couture and drag.

As a convoluted prequel to 101 Dalmatians, Cruella is an embarrassment.  In order to reorient its dog-skinning, chain-smoking sociopath from villain to anti-hero, Cruella has to change every single aspect of her persona until she’s unrecognizable.  Emma Stone might wear the right wigs and drive the right cars to signal her performance as Cruella De Ville cosplay, but the movie goes miles out of its way to make it clear that she loves dogs and refuses to wear fur.  Confusingly, as much as it wants to disassociate Cruella from her future sins, the movie also frantically runs around London collecting as many minor characters & callbacks to 101 Dalmatians as it can for cheap nostalgia pops, so that the source material is never allowed to drift from the audience’s mind.  The central couple of Roger & Anita from 101 Dalmatians have no tangible impact on the plot at hand but are afforded distracting amounts screentime to underline the film’s flimsy connection to the animated original.  Even the shoe-horned inclusion of dalmatians in Cruella’s origin story feel weirdly out of place, not least of all because they’re rendered in uncanny CGI that doesn’t resemble any breed of dog that’s ever walked the earth.

As Disney’s version of a “punk” film, Cruella is even more of an embarrassment.  A young, chaotic fashion designer sandwiched between the glam & punk eras of 1970s London, our haute-to-trot anti-hero is clearly modeled after Vivienne Westwood, and the tattered glamour of her work shines through in Cruella’s fashion designs in a really fun, authentic way.  However, the visual iconography that frames that lookbook-in-motion feels much less like first-wave punk than it does like jacket art for an early-aughts Avril Lavigne CD.  The unrelenting, ungodly expensive soundtrack places at least one classic pop song into every single scene—so that the entire film plays like a 134min trailer for itself—but actual punk songs are few & far between.  The best you can hope for is the most recognizable singles from safer, venerated punk acts like Blondie & The Clash.  Otherwise, there’s a neutered cover of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” with all its grimy Iggy-isms shielded from children’s ears, and a nighttime car chase is set to a fast-paced Queen track as if there aren’t a thousand punk singles that could’ve easily taken its place.  At the very least, it would’ve been nice to see Siouxsie Sioux, Exene Cervenka or, I dunno, the estates of Poly Styrene & Ari Up pick up an easy paycheck and a boost in Spotify streams here.

As much as I’m griping about Cruella‘s shaky punk credentials and sweaty desperation as a character-rehab prequel, I wouldn’t call it a total waste of time.  As a superhero movie for fashionable gay children, it’s a hoot.  Combining the Big Bad Anna Wintour drag routine of The Devil Wears Prada with Jenny Humphrey’s gate-crashing fashion shows on Gossip Girl (speaking of Avril Lavigne chic), Cruella is remarkably fun as an origin story for an emerging couturier on a revenge mission.  The costumes are fabulous, the (unskinned) underdog story is rousing, and Emma Thompson’s performance as the queen-bee villain is classic camp.  Instead of concluding with direct tie-ins to the opening notes of 101 Dalmatians, Cruella should’ve just signed off with its fully ascended anti-hero watching over London from the rooftops, wielding her sewing machine as a superweapon to avenge all the crimes of fashion on the streets below (à la The Dressmaker).  I might not understand this film as nostalgia bait or as punk rock posturing, but I do see its merits as a power fantasy for the future drag queens of America.  I hope they’re able to get their little hands on Cruella™ brand black & white wigs while they’re still young the same way Batman masks & He-Man swords were hot commodities when I was a kid.  It’s nice to have tangible props to help complete the fantasy.

Just like “Wells for Boys,” if you don’t get who Cruella is for, “That’s because it’s not for you, because you have everything.”  Personally speaking, the movie gave me everything I wanted out of it along with a bunch of stuff I never want out of anything. I recognize its many, many faults, but I also know that I’ll be suckered back into this exact scenario again as soon as Disney’s Ursula hits movie theaters in 2026.  Hopefully they cast an actual drag queen next time just to keep the routine fresh, but I’ll likely show up either way.

-Brandon Ledet

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

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I think the burning question about this recent string of live action Disney remakes is: why do this at all? Is this really necessary? Why instead of coming up with new stories are they remaking “the classics”? After this rendition of Beauty and the Beast, I have fewer answers than before, and I didn’t have many then.

The main draw to this version is the all-star cast: Emma Watson, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson. All the performances were fine, some even great; it’s just a shame many of them were hiding behind less than good CGI for what was basically the whole movie. That being said, Emma Watson played the role of Belle with an honest earnestness even when the rest of the cast was computerized. She’s actually made for this role, since the Disney version of Belle is as close to Princess Hermione as you’re ever going to get.

One of the ways this remake tried to freshen things up was by giving more explanation and backstory for the characters. Sadly, most of that felt like a forced afterthought. For instance, we get to hear about the Beast’s mean, old dad, but we never catch the Beast’s (the Prince of the fairy tale’s) name, nor any details of how exactly his dad was bad. Belle’s new, fleshed out history was in a few ways worse, in that it made the whole timeline of things nonsense. She quotes Romeo and Juliet, but has escaped Paris because of the plague. If you know anything about the history of the Black Plague & Shakespeare, or have access to Google, then you probably know that those two things are about 200 years apart. Sure, it’s nice to find out why exactly she’s stuck in this awful town and why she has a dead Disney mom, but I feel like it’s a little bit unnecessary. Which I guess brings us to the other character change-up, the elephant in the room: the gay stuff.

Oh, Le Fou, you poor thing. As the controversy around this movie mounted around the idea of him being gay, I already thought it was too good to be true. In my heart, I knew that there was no way Disney was going to make a fully formed human being of a gay character. At least I had no hopes to crush. He is a lovesick fool who occasionally gives catty advice to equally swooning gals. He’s the same old sniveling sidekick as he is in the original, just this time with more innuendo and a catty attitude. Having it cranked up a couple notches isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but given Disney’s track record on gay characters (Oh hey that one character in Frozen for 5 seconds and Ursula) it’s a bit tasteless. Though Le Fou is coded as a stereotypical sassy gay friend, I’m not going to lie, the dynamic between Gaston and him was what kept me sane throughout. In any other setting, their give and take would have made for a humorous cabaret type act: Gaston the slimy hypermasculine villain, Le Fou his emotional support. The musical duet between the two of them is one of the highlights of the movie.

In fact, Beauty and the Beast shines brightest when it comes to the musical numbers executed by real people. In the opening sequence the choreography is fun and mesmerizing. Belle’s iconic opening number is full of wonderfully synchronized moves. It’s fun, until it gets to the castle. It’s fun until you have to witness a bunch of 3D animated flatware execute a Busby-Berkeley style number in a movie that’s supposed to be a live action remake. It just feels like such great irony.

The real saving factor here, though, is that no matter how bombastic the tunes, over dramatic the themes, or mediocre the animation, this movie has a light hearted laugh at itself every now and then. It’s a pleasant reminder than in the midst of everything else this is still just a family film. Still, it’s hard not to watch it and think of the beloved animated classic longingly, especially as it just keeps dragging on and getting bogged down with new superfluous details, unmemorable added songs, and an aesthetic that could have sorely benefited from practical effects.

-Alli Hobbs