As the big night fast approaches, it’s time for another of Movieline’s virtual awards roundtables. Our Oscar nominees this time are up for Best Costume Design. They are (in alphabetical order):
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Even though it's something of a slick mess, Madonna's W.E. is just the kind of movie you'd expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl. A weirdly sympathetic portrait of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne, W.E. is the story of a life told through stuff: Evening gloves, cocktail shakers, baubles from Cartier, little hats trimmed with netting. It's as if Madonna went back in time and forgot to talk to actual people, to find out how they lived and what they thought -- but she sure did a lot of shopping.
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W.E. wasn't just an undertaking for Madonna, who directed her Wallis Simpson/Edward VIII biopic with all the lavish heft of a gigantic watercolor landscape. It was also a labor of love for Andrea Riseborough, the 30-year-old actress playing Simpson, the American socialite whose romance with Edward led to his abdication of the throne in 1936. The film's most enjoyable asset, Riseborough was saddled with making the polarizing Simpson a wholly charismatic figure -- an Evita without the benefit of torch songs. She succeeds, and with her thoroughly photogenic Edward (James D'Arcy) in tow, she softens W.E.'s melodrama with fantastic ease. We caught up with Riseborough to discuss her fascinating director, her feelings about the subject matter, and the zaniness of the Venice Film Festival.
I am obviously a thundering shill for Madonna whether she's making terrible movies with her ex-husband or making terrible movies with Griffin Dunne, but there's something about W.E.'s self-serious, accidental telenovela that's not even watchably bad. It's just humorless and overlong -- though Andrea Riseborough is fabulous as the polarizing Wallis Simpson. In a new 24-minute documentary about Madonna's big feature, the director and her cast do their best to sell their watercolored biopic, and I tell you what? They do a good job. Don't ask me to explain it. But James D'Arcy still looks like Anthony Perkins, so shut up and start crying in adoration.
The stakes are higher and the villains far more treacherous (Moriarty!), but everything in Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows is of a piece with the 2009 predecessor that introduced Robert Downey Jr.'s turn as the titular OCD turn of the century sleuth. For director Guy Ritchie it's felt like one long evolution from the days of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels; now, at the helm of his biggest film to date -- which features some of the most innovative action sequences of the season -- Ritchie is firmly in his wheelhouse. As he told Movieline recently in Los Angeles, "I enjoy playing in a bigger sandbox... and I enjoy having powerful friends to help me manifest a vision."
Apparently some people felt an apology was in order after Madonna was overheard dissing a gift she received from an ambushing fan at a Venice Film Festival press conference for her new, lovingly panned movie W.E.. "I absolutely loathe hydrangeas," she purred, adding, "[The fan] obviously doesn't know that." You know what I say to that? LEGEND. She is a LEGEND. Also: Madonna is a prim English rose, you simpering plebe! She is not a baroque tolerator of hydrangeas! But her publicist would like to address her offending comments anyway.
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