_All the Money in the World_ stars Christopher Plummer,
Mr. Sound-of-Music himself, as miserly Paul Getty who refuses
to pay his grandson's ransom for 4+ months. But the real
heroine is the mother played by Michelle Williams, who
steels herself to deal with the nightmare, not shedding
a single tear the entire film. Jessica Chastain would
not have done better in the steeliness department! I've
forgotten how much I like Williams, who has a quiet dignity
few American actresses can match. The cinematography, the
wide angle establishing shots, and the interiors of Getty's
mansions and the locations in Rome are also stunning.
Having streamed more than a few U.S. "indie" films on
amazon, and having watched the dreadful _The Master_ by
P.T. Anderson on DVD, I have gotten used to incompetent
visual filmmaking. Director Ridley Scott reminds me what
a real professional can do with a moderate budget.

I've also forgotten this was the film where Williams was
famously paid peanuts for the reshoot and Mark Wahlberg
got $1.5 millions. They reshot the scenes with Plummer
because he replaced the disgraced Kevin Spacey, on
extremely short notice, before the opening. That was
22 scenes in 8 days! Only a seasoned professional like
Ridley Scott could have pulled it off. I have given Scott
short drift in recent years, but the creator of _Blade
Runner_ hasn't lost an ounce of energy, or a tiny bit of
his visual artistry, in 40+ years.

---------------------------------------------------------------

_Elizabeth Harvest_ is a well-written science fiction
film by Sebastian Gutierrez. It belongs to the sub-genre
about a nubile space female alien/robot/clone finding her
destiny, but is much better grounded in literature than
recent overhyped affairs like _Under the Skin_ and _Ex-
Machina_. I know Gutierrez mostly by his loosely structured
comedies about women, many of which stars his wife Carla
Gugino (_Women in Trouble_, _Girl Walks in a Bar_, _Hotel
Noir_). Gugino is always good, but the other actresses
in his films often come off as so much better and more
intelligent than in their other work! _Elizabeth
Harvest_ has a much more meticulously structured story.
In the DVD extras Gutierrez mentions that the film is
inspired by the "Blue Beard" story. Ciaran Hinds plays
a genius biologists who try to recreate his dead wife
from six clones he made of her, but ends up killing
most of them. Less than a third into the film, he
gets killed himself! And then the protagonist role
gets passed to the clones (Abbey Lee), his assistant
(Gugino), and his blind son (Matthew Beard), one by one,
although Hinds appear in flashback scenes. It is very
interest storytelling. Visually it is excellent as well,
the color scheme inspired by _2046_ (as he says himself)
and the location of an isolated mansion s well-chosen.
Abbey Lee is a newbie and she is not bad either; you
can see her character's evolution as the story proceeds.
She is so much better than the wildly overpraised Scarlet
Johannson in _Under the Skin_ (all over the place,
one moment a determined killer and the next a shivering
innocent -- the actress simply doesn't seem to know
what she is doing) or Alicia Vikander in _Ex-Machina_
(stone-faces her way through the entire film). Yet
_Elizabeth Harvest_ barely broke $4K in ticket sales
in theaters. Our cinematic culture is going to hell,
and the movie critics, with their capricious annointing
of winners and auteurs, have a lot to answer for.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)