Indie Focus: Fashion and villainy in ‘Cruella’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

Since it’s nice to be prepared, the Academy announced some key dates for next year’s Oscars — key being that they will be on March 27, 2022, splitting the difference between their more typical late February date and this year’s April event. As Glenn Whipp explained, the Academy may actually be getting out of the way of the Beijing Olympics and the Super Bowl.

Also this week, Ryan Faughnder and Wendy Lee explained what Amazon’s deal to buy MGM really means for Hollywood:

“The pandemic has accelerated the consumer shift toward streaming-on-demand content, putting pressure on cable companies and movie theaters that are struggling to deal with the fallout. Although some studios and media companies have launched rival streaming services such as Paramount+ and Peacock, their user numbers pale in comparison with the subscriber bases of larger players such as Netflix.

“Schuyler Moore, a partner at the law firm Greenberg Glusker, said he expects more consolidation. Studios previously had so much power because they controlled distribution, but that’s changed in the streaming world, in which studios have become production houses for streamers.

“‘The truth is, whoever controls distribution wins,’ Moore said. ‘Content is not king. Distribution is king.’”

Read the full story for more on the purchase, which still requires regulatory approval, and sign up for Ryan’s newsletter, the Wide Shot, for more industry news and analysis.

This week’s movie releases have a big “theaters are back” energy, one we hope to see continue through the summer. I will personally be seeing a movie projected in a theater for the first time in nearly 15 months this upcoming week, not once but twice. One is a festival preview I can’t yet talk about, while the other is the screening of “In the Heights” as part of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, which runs from June 2-6. Needless to say, I am very excited.

‘Cruella’

Directed by “I, Tonya” filmmaker Craig Gillespie from a script and story credited to a team of writers with “The Favourite,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Venom” between them, the Disney origin story “Cruella” is quite a vibe. In the film, set in London during the 1970s, an aspiring young fashion designer named Estella (Emma Stone) works for the establishment figure known as the Baroness (Emma Thompson) before striking out as her alter ego, Cruella de Vil. The film is in theaters and available for an added premium on Disney+.

Emily Zemler spoke to Stone, Gillespie, production designer Fiona Crombie and costume designer Jenny Beavan, who won an Oscar for her work on “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

As Stone said of the unlikely collision of punk-era London and a Disney origin story, “It was a time where there was a big shift into counterculture and [the] Sex Pistols, anti-establishment mentality. Obviously this is a Disney movie about a villain. This isn’t really as punk as it gets. But that era and that feel of going against the grain in a major way, especially in London, is exciting for a character like Cruella, who is born to be bad. And definitely doesn’t want to blend in, deep down. Even though Estella is a bit more conventional because of her nurture, I think the true nature of Cruella is letting your freak flag fly.”

Reviewing the film for The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “It’s instructive that in ‘The Favourite,’ one of a few recent films to feature as many ruffled gowns and sky-high wigs as this one, Stone nailed every nuance as another lowly young woman turned ambitious schemer. That movie reveled in its moral ambiguities; ‘Cruella,’ trying to do something similar, is ultimately stymied by them. While its surface pleasures are dazzling — if a bit protracted, at well north of two hours — it finally suggests that memorable screen villainy and complex inner humanity may be forced into a kind of stalemate, at least when there’s a corporate-branded intellectual property involved. ‘Cruella’ isn’t a bad movie, even if its heroine is nowhere near bad enough.”

For Slate, Karen Han wrote, “All in all, ‘Cruella’ is much better than it needs to be, and is hampered primarily by the fact that it’s a Disney movie, both in the sense that it has to heel to its animated and live-action predecessors, and in that making its main character a genuine antihero isn’t an option. As the main character of a Disney film, Cruella has to remain sympathetic, and as a Disney production, ‘Cruella’ has to make some ham-handed attempts at moralizing. Those constraints might hold the movie back, but like the punks who inspired its costumes, it at least knows how to make bondage gear look good.”

For Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson wrote, “‘Cruella’ is a tiring, deeply uncool assault, reaching its nadir with that hammy fashion show, in which punk is born and then immediately smothered in its crib. … Perhaps the biggest question of ‘Cruella’ is not how she got the way she got, but who this movie is for. It’s probably too violent for little kids, too kiddie for older ones, and little more than a loud chore for parents. Marketing materials have suggested that we embrace the film’s transgressive spirit — there’s a small, mostly sidelined character who is coded as queer or non-binary or something; Disney doesn’t care to provide more detail — but ‘Cruella’s’ ersatz punk is as safe as can be.”

Emma Stone as Cruella in Disney’s live-action “Cruella.”

(Laurie Sparham / Disney)

‘A Quiet Place Part II’

Written and directed by John Krasinski, “A Quiet Place Part II” includes a flashback to a time before the story of the 2018 hit began, then picks up right where that film left off. This time the Abbott family (now Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds and an infant) again battle the creatures with super-sensitive hearing. Along the way, they encounter characters played by Cillian Murphy, Djimon Hounsou and Scoot McNairy. The film is playing in theaters where they are open.

Sonaiya Kelley spoke to Krasinski and Blunt about the pandemic-induced wait to see the movie finally released to theaters. As Blunt said, “The movie is made for theaters so I’m relieved and grateful that we waited and were given the support to wait. … And I think John always felt quite sure that he’d like it to be one of the first movies back in theaters. It was always sort of what he wanted for it.”

In his review for The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “The first film told us nothing about the aliens’ origins and, apart from its shivery prologue, ‘A Quiet Place Part II’ tells us little more. What it gives us instead is a highly watchable, dramatically wobbly gloss on ‘War of the Worlds’ that, for all its atmosphere and visual intricacy — well realized in Polly Morgan’s richly textured cinematography (shot on 35-millimeter film) and Jess Gonchor’s corpse-strewn, twisted-metal scenery — feels incomplete by design. … Chalk it up to the growing pains of an accidental franchise: ‘Part II’ feels caught between two conflicting modes, a tightly focused family drama and a more expansive vision of post-apocalyptic decay.”

For the AP, Lindsey Bahr wrote, “The reason these films work is not because of the scares. They work because, at their heart, they are a high concept meditation on parenting. Sure, the surprises keep your heart rate up and all that but the true terror, the one that buries itself in your consciousness, comes from that deep, intractable fear of not being able to protect your kids. Many monster movies boldly claim to be about something bigger and rarely are. These films succeed at that.”

For the Tribune News Service, Katie Walsh wrote, “Suffused with a deeply earnest sense of self-seriousness but not a shred of humor, camp, or self-awareness, ‘A Quiet Place’ is horror for people who don’t seem to like horror all that much. … ‘A Quiet Place Part II’ offers the chance to take the concept and run with it, but in keeping with his own characters’ moronic decision-making, writer/director Krasinski instead stays right where he started, offering up a film that would have been the next 90 minutes of ‘A Quiet Place.’”

A family (Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds and Emily Blunt) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.”

(Jonny Cournoyer / Paramount Pictures)

‘Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue’

Directed by Jia Zhangke, the documentary “Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue” explores the lives of four writers from the same province as Jia, creating a tapestry about changes to life in China from the 1950s onward. The film is playing locally at the Laemmle Royal.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “Like so much of this director’s work — including his earlier films ‘Dong’ (2006) and ‘Useless’ (2007), with which it forms a loose trilogy of documentaries about artists — ‘Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue’ resists the obvious, even when it finally reveals the meaning behind its poetic title. It’s a brief, bittersweet jolt of an anecdote, and it reminds us of the stories we’re so often told in life — sometimes true, sometimes not — and also of the wisdom and firsthand experience that can help us tell the difference.”

For the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “‘Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue’ demystifies historical episodes that are often presented, at least in the West, as abstractions, and personalizes large-scale events. Politics hovers over the writers’ lives, but their sense of national and regional history is filtered through work, family and landscape. … Between the lines of their conversations with the unseen director you can intuit the elusive larger story — about the evolution of a poor, rural corner of an emerging global superpower — that is both his subject and theirs.”

Writing for Film Comment — in a review available to newsletter subscribers before going on the website Monday — Sukhdev Sandhu wrote, “‘Swimming Out’ retreads too much old territory for it to be considered one of Jia’s major works. It does, however, contain one of his most endearing scenes: The director asks Liang’s Beijing-raised son to introduce himself in Henan dialect. At first he’s shy and says he can’t remember it. He dredges his memory to no avail, the words disappearing like the water levels in his family’s village. His mother intercedes, uttering phrases and sentences (‘I turned fourteen this year,’ ‘My hobby is physics’) that he copies — before discovering that he can say them himself. He smiles. The language of his forebears, the sun and the soil it conjures up, its melodies and mood worlds: suddenly the past is no longer past.”

Author Liang Hong in Jia Zhangke’s 2020 documentary “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue.”

(Cinema Guild)