UP UP AND AWAY

You don’t see an A-List steampunk movie too often. (And sometimes you shouldn’t: The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyone?)

But check this out: The Aeronauts, with Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as mid-Victorian hot air balloonists!

He’s a meteorologist, she’s a balloon expert, and they boldly go where few have gone before (mainly up) with a cargo of gadgets to study the weather.

Maybe not room for a lot of action or plot twists in such confined quarters, but hey, that’s what I thought going into Gravity! This one looks like great, clockwork fun to me!

Here’s the caveat: When the promo says “Inspired by a True Adventure,” (don’t they all?), in this case it means everything IS true — this expedition actually occurred — except for the woman aeronaut played by Jones. She’s as imaginary a character as Harvey.

Redmayne’s meteorologist is a historical figure, but his real-life partner in this enterprise was pioneering male aeronaut Henry Coxwell, who saved the day, the craft, and their lives when things took a dire turn.

Revisionist or not, all could be forgiven if the movie proves to be as ripping a yarn as this trailer suggests. Director Tom Harper’s last movie, Wild Rose, had its moments.

We’ll find out in December! Stay tuned . . .

OSCAR BARBIE REDUX

Just when you thought it was safe to return to the blog—oh no! Oh yes! It's the Return of the Oscar Barbies!

Okay, one of these days, I'll decide I'm too cool to do this.

But this is not that day. The urge to dress up my collection of vintage Barbies as Academy Award nominees is proving to be a hard habit to break.

A lot depends of whether the nominees are visually interesting. Historical and fantasy costumes are the most fun to try to replicate, but you can't always depend on those actors scoring nominations. And while I used to try to confine myself to Best Actress nominees, sometimes I'll throw in a Supporting Actress nominee if she'll be extra fun to do.

Case in point: this year, I got to do both Alicia Vikander AND Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl! Who could resist?

Sadly, my Barbie wardrobe does not include any outfits from the 1920s, but I did have a kimono and a bohemian drape to swath them in. And it's all about the props anyway: a cigarette holder and a painter's palette. And with a Barbie-sized red wig I happened to have lying around, "Eddie" was good to go!

Carol was cause for happy-dance time in Barbie-land, since so many of my antique doll clothes are vintage 1950s. Both lead actresses scored nominations: Cate Blanchett for the extravagantly stylish Carol, and Rooney Mara, as the awed shopgirl and amateur shutterbug (notice her box camera) swept away by her.

(If you saw the movie, you'll understand the Santa hat.)

The only other nominees I decided to do were Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn (also set in the '50s), and Brie Larson in Room. I knew Larson would win, so I thought it would be churlish not to include her—even though modern-day outfits aren't nearly as much fun to do.


(Also, for those of you keeping score at home, I was 12 for 13 in my fearless and/or clueless Oscar predictions this year.

The only one I missed was Sylvester Stallone NOT getting a make-up Oscar for playing the aging Rocky Balboa in Creed—40 years (!) after he first introduced the character in the original Rocky. No one was probably more surprised than the elegant Mark Rylance, who scored the upset win for Bridge of Spies.)

Btw, slaving over a hot doll table for a couple of hours yesterday really made me appreciate the care and quality that went into the Barbie phenomenon when the doll was first launched ca. 1960.

Those early clothes have teeny tiny buttons the size of pin heads, miniscule hooks-and-eyes, inch-long zippers. It's a skills test manipulating them for a person of a certain age (like me), let alone for kids.

But that quality era didn't last long. In later years, items of Barbie clothing were made to be stepped into or pulled on overhead; their closures were snaps, not buttons.

This probably coincided with the era when all Barbie packaging went bubble-gum pink, and all accessories became plastic—no more cork soles in the wedgies; no more straw hats or handbags.

These days, Barbie clothes come in in neon colors, attached by Velcro. Except here, in the exclusive sorority of Oscar Barbies, where my collection of little Miss Havershams still get to wear their antique clothes, ever ready for their next close-up.

INSIDE OUT

Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe, 1921

Actors soar in tender, fact-based transgender story The Danish Girl


What must it be like to feel that the body you were born into is the wrong gender? This cataclysmic emotional shift in identity is such a private matter, it seems near impossible to capture onscreen.


But Tom Hooper makes a valiant effort in The Danish Girl, the fact-based story of Danish landscape painter Einar Wegener, one of the first people known to have undergone sexual reassignment surgery in the 1920s, transitioning into a woman named Lili Elbe.


Although the spotlight is on Einar/Lili, the larger story Hooper tells is the evolving relationship between the painter and his wife, Gerda.

It is Gerda's journey, watching the husband she adores turn into someone else, and the choices she must face to accept and support him, that makes their story so engrossing.

Factor in a couple of splendidly nuanced performances from Eddie Redmayne, as Einar/Lili, and Alicia Vikander, as Gerda, and it all adds up to a moving, tender, and sometimes even wryly funny portrait of love and identity.

Vikander and Redmayne as Gerda and Einar: Oscar-bait

Scripted by Lucinda Coxson, the movie is adapted from the novel by David Ebershoff. The book is a fictionalized account, so it doesn't necessarily stick to the facts of the Wegeners' real lives.

 But as a work of fiction, this tale of sexual confusion and transition is told with compassion and clarity.

That magic moment: Einar poses for Gerda

In Copenhagen, 1926, Einar Wegener (Redmayne) is a successful painter of lovely, meticulous landscapes. His wife, Gerda (Vikander), is also a painter, but she can't get anyone in the local art community to take her portraits seriously. The two of them met in art school, married young, and enjoy a healthy, active, sex life and a playful sense of camaraderie.

Redmayne as Lili

 Rushing to finish a commissioned portrait one day, when her model is delayed, Gerda begs Einar to pose in a pair of silk stockings and satin slippers so she can paint his feet. The effect on Einar is immediate and electrifying, as an aspect of his personality he's been trying to suppress his whole life begins to assert itself.

It's no surprise that Redmayne tackles his role with persuasive delicacy. But Vikander (having a great year, after Ex Machina and Testament of Youth) is the real Oscar-bait for her tough, funny, sensitive Gerda. (Read more)

Hooper's film might have been even gutsier had he stuck closer to the truth of the Wegeners' lives. For one thing, the couple had already moved to Paris in 1912 to immerse themselves in the Bohemian art scene and escape the more conventional morality of Copenhagen society.

The real Lili, ca 1930: all girl

Gerda was the more successful artist, a magazine illustrator who became notorious for her decadent drawings and erotic female watercolors. Some biographies suggest that she an Lili lived openly as a lesbian couple in Paris. Lili certainly remained one of Gerda's favorite models.

(That's Gerda's portrait of the two of them at the top of this post.)

Gerda married another man (at Lili's insistence, according to some sources), when her marriage to Einar was legally annulled by King Christian X of Denmark after Einar's first surgery became public knowledge. By then, Lili had a male suitor she also hoped to marry.

Obviously, the shifting psychological currents between them must have been even more complex than in the film.

Sexual identity is a tricky and very personal subject. Hooper tells a simplified version of the story, but that he grapples with it at all, with so much reason and empathy, is satisfying indeed.

The real Gerda and Einar with one of Gerda's paintings

THE TIME LORD

Terrific acting highlights gripping Hawking bio "Theory of Everything'


Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and admired figures in the world.

A brilliant mathematician, cosmologist, and researcher into the relativity of space and time, he's a university professor, a popular guest on the lecture circuit, and the author of many non-fiction books that make complex science comprehensible to lay readers. (His A Brief History of Time was on the bestseller charts for five years.)

He's such a pop culture icon, he's even appeared as himself in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The Simpsons.

Young Prof. Hawking

And almost all of the above was accomplished with Hawking confined to a wheelchair during the inexorable progression of a motor neuron disease related to ALS. The image of Hawking slouched in his motorized wheelchair, communicating through his robotic voice synthesizer, is so well-known, it's difficult to imagine him any other way.

But that changes with The Theory of Everything. A smart, funny, and tender biographical drama that begins with Hawking as a vigorous young grad student at Cambridge, it also tells the enduring love story of Hawking and his first wife, Jane.

Attn Oscar voters: Redmayne as Hawking

Scripted by Anthony McCarten (from a memoir written by Jane Hawking), the film is directed by James Marsh, who made the absorbing documentary Man On Wire. Marsh proves to be just as adept with narrative drama, abetted here by his two stars, the exceptional Eddie Redmayne as Stephen (yes, the Oscar race starts here), and the formidable Felicity Jones as Jane.

Redmayne is terrific at every stage of Stephen's life. Gradually robbed of an actors usual tools—movement, voice, facial expression —he still manages to convey Stephen's lively intelligence, his active participation in the life around him, his dry sense of humor.

Remarkably clear-headed, yet moving, Marsh's film defies expectations of what an "uplifting" biopic can be—just as Hawking (now 72, in real life) defied all expectations. The Theory of Everything simply celebrates tenacity—in life, love, and ideas. (Read more)