“We love each other so much,” sing Adam Driver‘s Henry and Marion Cotillard‘s Ann as they ride together on a motorcycle through the night in Leos Carax‘s new film, Annette (2021). This song, in addition to being the film’s catchiest tune, is indicative of the kind of musical that Carax and his collaborators from the band Sparks – who have co-written the screenplay with the increasingly elusive cinéma du look filmmaker – have set out to make: a musical of descriptive expressiveness rather than emotional substance. It’s a delicate balancing act that traipses intermittently through inspiration and banality, but the cast renders the film compelling throughout.

Like Romeo and Juliet, two disparate individuals are established as star-crossed lovers – who, as celebrities, live up to the celestial notion of stars. On one hand is Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), a popular comedian who is on the rise with his “mildly offensive” humor and onstage antics; and on the other, the fantastically popular opera singer Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard). Together, their romance is the subject of tabloid exposés thanks to the ever-watchful gaze of the paparazzi. Outside of the limelight, they have a relationship that is haptic in its interest in tickling and making love, but there is little that is dramatically offered to justify their union beyond biology. He is a man, she is a woman, and they bring into the world a child of their own named Annette. Predictably, and disappointingly so, the birth of Annette is when the story begins to shift as Henry succumbs to alcoholism and destructive behaviors that were never hinted at prior to being abruptly introduced. This is a fairytalelike shift comparable to the one in Carax’s Pola X (1999), which has a well-off character dramatically drift into abject poverty, but even that occurs over a distinct period of time. Annette is a film in which characters are only what they say they are, and they should largely be trusted as there is little room for lies in such a film.

Except, perhaps, for media-inspired nightmares! This is best realized in the use of a wooden marionette puppet to represent the child of Henry and Ann. As a child, Annette is something that her parents project their hopes and dreams onto. She is not herself, at least as an infant, but rather something that can be shaped and whittled down into anything. Her conditioning as a child to the life of performers soon takes on a more haunting quality, but that’s largely because of the nature of who we are told Henry is as opposed to who we see he is. It’s telling – or more precisely, singing – rather than showing.

There are moments of grand gestures and subtle realizations of the heart, but they are delivered on a foundation of description before they are allowed to stand on their own as affecting drama. The lyrics become a stand-in for the actual application of the words sung by all involved, and the frustrating brilliance of this is what it allows Annette to focus upon, while choosing not to adhere to, the idea of “entertaining” an audience in the theatrically-conventional sense.

The opening track, “So May We Start,” is a song that introduces the essence of the self-aware storytelling that is about to transpire, but it doesn’t prepare the audience for the use of repetition in lieu of nuanced lyrics that will convey the heart and soul of Annette. From the lyrics alone, there is only the shell of a soul, and yet Annette itself, lensed by Caroline Champetier, is a highly-accomplished work in a way that Carax’s previous film from nine years ago, Holy Motors (2012), is not. While cinema followers may admire the self-reflexive themes in Holy Motors, a film that laments the loss of a cinema that once was while searching for the cinema that could be, Annette is instead a film that is filled with flourishes bearing little purpose that evoke what Carax was once celebrated for: a playful mastery of film language. Staggered, slow-motion shots of Henry swinging his microphone, the beauty of a motorcycle going down the highway by starlight, or the superimposing of images over the road all remind us of Carax’s knack for visual storytelling, and yet this is a film of words. The presence of a scene with the theatrical dimming of the lights, as with the birth of baby Annette, is particularly powerful, and it’s the kind of thing that draws attention to the artifice of cinema as well as its use of theatre tradition. Still, such a scene is in service of a script that requires something like the dimming of lights to set it apart. The cinematic devices utilized by Carax and company become a counterpoint of sorts to the script, but the script is the guiding light of the whole endeavor.

Thankfully, the film is supported by Adam Driver, who can almost single-handedly sell that he’s telling the audience “we love each other so much” instead of ever truly having to show it. Driver’s singing voice is uniquely deep and pleasant to the ear, and he brings an intensity to the role of Henry that implies signifiers for the behavior that is attributed to his character in song alone. With less screen time, Simon Helberg also leaves a strong impression as the accompanist for Ann’s performances. At one point, the camera is spinning around Helberg’s character as he conducts the orchestra while telling us, the audience, about how he fits into this whole story, and it is one of the crowning achievements in Annette both dramatically and aesthetically. The redness around Helberg’s eyes and the ferocity of his conducting are over the top, to be sure, but they convey – in conjunction with the carefully-choreographed camera movement – a plot point that would otherwise fall flat were it delivered as nonchalantly as the rest of the film’s drama.

While fans of the musical number with Kylie Minogue in Holy Motors may be intrigued by the prospect of a full musical by Carax, the result is something far less interesting than it should be. Carax has always been a musically-inclined filmmaker, from the Bowie songs in Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais sang (1986) to the continuous-shot instrumental interlude in Holy Motors, but Annette struggles to feel cohesive as the story gets in the way and slows itself down. Were the lyrics more dynamic, perhaps Annette would rise above the feeling that all of this has been sung before, but at least we are left with the form of a stylish musical that has the courage to be frank about love.

Annette is currently ranked 1,696/2,707 (37%) on my Flickchart.

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Free Guy can be shamelessly commercial, even hanging a mild bit of character development on a hit Mariah Carey song. Yet despite some noticeable script flaws, Free Guy manages to be a fun and light-hearted story of self-discovery with hints of The Truman Show, Ready Player One, and more baked in. With Ryan Reynolds‘ affable leading performance, the charms of the film pull you in, even though this is ultimately a middling effort at best.

Reynolds plays Guy, an NPC video-game character in a popular Fortnite-like game called Free City. He lives out the same routine everyday with a blinding happiness until he begins to question his routine and try to do something different. The plot essentially centers around the explanation of why a video-game character begins to become sentient, and it all boils down to what is essentially some mild corporate espionage. We cut back and forth between the video-game world and the real world, where two programmers (Joe Keery and Jodie Comer) fight off the machinations of money-hungry Antoine (Taika Waititi), who stole their code.

As one might guess from that description, much of the plot has a been-there done-that feeling to it. Free Guy deals in the  tropes of some of the previously-mentioned films. Director Shawn Levy has made a career out of mid-tier comedies that are just competent enough to be entertaining, if never great. I will give Free Guy credit for being firmly planted in the modern day, with its use of YouTuber commentary and ideas about careers in game design. It avoids the false missteps that this type of film might have had 10 years ago.

Yet much of Free Guy still feels safe and by the numbers. It hints at a few interesting ideas that evoke Her, but it backs away from ever becoming as deep or impactful as that. Free Guy is here to be a fun, blockbuster-like film, and on those terms, it largely succeeds.

Reynolds just oozes charisma. Waititi’s small, villainous role is a tad goofy, but Waititi is naturally funny enough to make it work. There are also some fun cameo roles from a variety of actors that I won’t spoil.

The ending of the film seems almost to parody modern blockbusters, though Free Guy can’t help but be one at the same time. The corporate synergy of Disney owning everything is used to its fullest extent, with some major properties getting a nod in the finale including a well-timed moment that left me laughing quite loudly.

The unfortunate part of Free Guy is that there is so little to it. Its theme of finding purpose and its half-hearted romance subplot feel staid and predictable. The fact that this review is struggling to find more to say says all.

Tell us your thoughts on Free Guy below and rank more on Flickchart today!

The post Review: Free Guy first appeared on Flickchart: The Blog.

Second time’s the charm. While the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) has been a bit of a helter-skelter cinematic universe, the new model has embraced stand-alone stories and allowed directors to showcase their strengths. After the disaster of 2016’s Suicide Squad, DC stole James Gunn from Marvel to do his own take on the team of villains. Now Gunn has created one of the most zealously violent and hilarious superhero films of all time.

The Suicide Squad may be the crowning film of this film universe, if it can even be really considered one at this point. Initially attempting to rival Marvel by creating a continuity of shared films, DC’s rushed attempts resulted in mixed results including Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. While there are zealous fans of Zack Snyder’s vision of a shared continuity, the critical and commercial results have led to DC taking more of a standalone approach and leaving Snyder by the wayside. These superhero films may loosely share a continuity, but connecting them has not mattered for the last three years of films, with each one including only minimal references to other characters.

This approach benefits Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Taking the elements it likes from the notorious 2016 bomb (mainly casting), a new story is created and old elements are left behind. Assuming the audience knows what to expect by now and has no need for overdrawn origin stories, Gunn opens the film at a clip and with a near-montage that quickly introduces the premise of this team of characters — supervillains given dangerous missions for the US government in exchange for amnesty — before jumping into the fun. The intro provides a brilliant twist on the entire premise and the notion of origin stories, and I dare not say more. This deserves to be seen as freshly as possible.

Manic energy is sustained through the entirety of the film. While his use of music may seem like a rip-off of his own Guardians of the Galaxy, Gunn’s soundtrack choices here are a tad different and help drive the rhythm of the film more so than individual scenes do. Gunn also plays around with flashbacks and creative on-screen title cards comprised of foreground and background features to make a movie whose pacing is always unexpected, yet gels really well.

The energy does disadvantage the film somewhat when it comes to character building. The script attempts to give arcs to each of the characters, but this often results in contrived scenes where these murderous supervillains start monologuing about their troubled past to each other for no real reason. The film feints at a theme of underdogs finding family (a familiar concept for Gunn) but doesn’t develop it in any meaningful or new way. The lack of pretense and narrative brevity are perhaps strengths, overall, but they do make the film feel too light at times.

A fantastic cast makes it easy to look past these issues. Margot Robbie returns as what is the now most consistent character across the DCEU, Harley Quinn. Robbie is a delight in the role, even as she changes designs and motivation ever so slightly across her films. Idris Elba also elevates what would otherwise be a rather dull and one-note character with a dry humor and understated comic delivery. John Cena has a wonderful rapport with Elba as Peacemaker, a character so dedicated to peace that they use the ultimate violence to get it. That’s a character premise that seems perfectly suited to Gunn’s predilections.

The film is very crass and over-the-top violent, but this is not lowbrow humor. The script is constantly creative in how it approaches scenes and character encounters. A CGI shark-man voiced by Sylvester Stallone rips people in half and eats them. Situational humor is set up where the Suicide Squad massacres a whole bunch of people with a hilariously unexpected result. The mixture of intentionally excessive broad humor, darker jokes, and onscreen visuals and flair make The Suicide Squad relentlessly fun.

This is certainly not a perfect film. If you want a version of this with better character arcs, Gunn’s Guardians is right there, with more coming. But letting him tackle a similar story with the freedom of an R-rating and characters and continuity that are bit looser results in one of the funniest and most rambunctious movies in this genre. This is what the Deadpool movies want to be. This is a film where the insanity and silliness of a giant starfish monster fighting a talking man-shark is embraced. Gunn has killed it here, and I almost want him to commit Marvel-career suicide with the third Guardians film if it means we get more of these.

Tell us your thoughts on The Suicide Squad below and rank all of the DCEU on Flickchart today!

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Welcome back to the Flickchart Texas BBQ Road Trip, where we are visiting the best BBQ spots and films in Texas! Last time we were in Austin, and now we head up to north Texas for the first time. Join us as we drive up the highway, stopping just south of Dallas in another small Texas town.

Stop #16: Cedar Hill, Harris Bar-B-Que

Cedar Hill was founded back in 1846 by a group of settlers from southern American states, making it one of the biggest settlements in the area. While no major historical events or occurrences have happened in the small town, it had a notable tornado in 1856 that claimed several lives and a bank robbery in 1932 by one of the sidekicks of Bonnie and Clyde, Raymond Hamilton. The town was the county seat of Dallas County until the tornado came, after which the seat moved to Dallas proper. Many of the buildings from the town’s founding remain standing, which accounts for the large number of registered historical places in the area.

Today, Cedar Hill is like many of the small town BBQ spots we’ve covered so far. It’s enjoying Texas’s overall economic boom and has rapidly expanded since the 1990s. Increased economic opportunity has drawn people in, as has the beautiful nature surrounding the town. Cedar Hill is dotted with parks and hiking opportunities, including Cedar Hill State Park which is full of wildlife, and the beautiful Joe Pool Lake, a popular spot for water recreation.

All of this helped attract Harris Bar-B-Que, which moved here in 2019 from nearby Waxahachie. Kelvin Harris had been operating his black offset smoker all around Cedar Hill and Dallas for the better part of a decade, selling his product every day out of parking lots and gas stations in a questionably-legal manner. He eventually settled down and opened a brick-and-mortar joint in nearby Waxahachie, and there his reputation took off. Using a reverse flow smoker, he cooks hot and heavy right over the wood, which is usually a mixture of hickory, oak, and whatever else he scrounges up — sometimes pecan wood.

Another specialty of his is mixing pineapple juice into his BBQ sauce, which gives it a distinct flavor. When I visited I chowed down on some brisket and sausage doused in sauce. The brisket was nice and moist, but lacked a distinct bark or smoke ring. While not every brisket is obliged to follow the Central Texas model, its flavor somewhat faded in comparison to some of those briskets and amidst the abundance of sauce. The sausage was better, with a nice springy snap and flavor. I also enjoyed sides of green beans and potato salad. This place definitely wasn’t bad, but it doesn’t quite reach the upper echelons of the list.

I award the brisket 3.5 slices out of 5, and the sausage 4 links out of 5. I award Harris Bar-B-Que 3.5 smokers out of 5.

The Film: Tender Mercies

Two films were considered seriously for this spot, both of which take place in Waxahachie, the first home of Harris Bar-B-Que. Cedar Hill isn’t far, so both are still appropriate. While Places in the Heart was almost the winner, Tender Mercies was ultimately the best selection. The film never explicitly mentions Waxahachie, but the distances discussed while traveling to Austin and Dallas match, and it was shot almost entirely in Waxahachie.

Robert Duvall plays a broken country musician struggling with alcoholism who begins to turn his life around after starting a relationship with a young widow (Tess Harper). The film is full of country music, a suitable choice for a rural Texas setting, and Duvall sings all of his character’s songs and even wrote a few. The strength of the lead performance earned praise from Texas country music star Waylon Jennings, some of whose songs appear in the film.

Emotions are big in Tender Mercies and threaten to veer into melodrama at times. But director Bruce Beresford manages to reign in the excesses and deliver a touching picture about grace, forgiveness, and recovery. The struggles of Duvall’s character feel real, and the film takes plenty of time to explore the pains he is going through. While the story features the domestic struggles of many a soap opera, the stark realism attached to it keeps it from feeling phony.

Beresford wrote the script, inspired by the similarities between Texas and his native Australian bush country. Australia has its own country music scene, due partly to this sense of kinship. The photography of the relatively barren Waxahachie circa early 1980s creates some beautiful empty landscapes that add to the isolation of Duvall’s character. Likewise, Tess Harper earned the co-starring part for embodying those qualities. Beresford spotted her on-stage in Texas during the casting process and brought her in to help capture the film’s rural quality.

With the fantastic performances, wonderful landscapes, and strong story, Tender Mercies authentically captures small-town Texas. The country music is good and genuine, and the sense of catharsis at the end feels like a good country song. In a way, Tender Mercies is like a Texas country song made into film: a good story with big, genuine emotions that deliver a piece of human truth.

Does anyone eat barbecue in the film?

Nope. There’s relatively little eating of any sort in this film.

The Rankings

Texas Film Chart

1. No Country for Old Men
2. Rushmore
3. Boyhood
4. The Right Stuff
5. Lone Star
6. Chef
7. Tender Mercies
8. Dazed and Confused
9. The Sugarland Express
10. Frank
11. Whip It
12. This is Where We Live
13. The Alamo
14. Outlaw Blues
15. Selena
16. Nadine

Texas BBQ Chart

1. Franklin Barbecue
2. Pinkerton’s Barbecue
3. Terry Black’s Barbecue
4. Stiles Switch BBQ
5. Valentina’s Tex Mex BBQ
6. 2M Smokehouse
7. Vera’s Backyard Bar-B-Que
8. Hays Co. Bar-B-Que
9. Smolik’s Smokehouse
10. Gatlin’s BBQ
11. Micklethwait Craft Meats
12. Payne’s Bar-B-Q Shak
13. The Pit Room
14. Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que
15. The Smoking Oak
16. Harris Bar-B-Que

Join us again next time for more delicious smoked meats and fantastic Lone Star cinema!

The post Flickchart Road Trip: Tender Mercies first appeared on Flickchart: The Blog.