In Which We Destroy Virtually Every Tulip We See

Married Without Kids

by ELEANOR MORROW

Tulip Fever
dir. Justin Chadwick
107 minutes

The first moment that Sophia (Alicia Vikander) sees Jan (Dane DeHaan), she is overcome with a latent eroticism that will haunt her for the remainder of her days. Her husband Cornelis (Christoph Waltz) is completely oblivious to this; and he is substantially more interested in the idea of infecting Sophia with a parasite that will ruin her body and mind. Unfortunately, Sophia is unable to get pregnant in Tulip Fever, and the movie is about how crazy this drives her, and how useless she feels because of it.

In metaphorical sympathy for his new, married girlfriend's plight, Jan becomes obsessed with making his fortune in the fledgling tulip industry. On a scale of one to ten, how excited would you say the idea of a fast-paced tulip auction is to you? How about if it were written by Tom Stoppard? The executives behind Tulip Fever have taken more than five years to refine this subdued film into something more exciting than the sum of its parts.

Its parts consist of short, abbreviated sex scenes where moisture is cast over Vikander's taut, dark body to imitate the throes of ecstasy. Vikander and DeHaan look substantially younger than they have in more recent roles, reminding us of how disastrous a person's twenties can be. Vikander is forced to be rather muted and boring as this long-suffering wife, but she is already expert at this put-upon role. DeHaan seems substantially more excited in his scenes with Zach Galifianakis than when he is penetrating Alicia, and his relative lack of enthusiasm with Vikander's character seems to subtly imply his homosexuality.

Disappointingly and predictably, there is absolutely nothing in the way of happily ever after in this film, which is just as well, since it is shaping up to be a tragic failure at the box office. Since you will likely never be seeing Tulip Fever, I can tell that Alicia Vikander fakes her own death rather than continue to be raped by Christoph Waltz. This is perhaps just as well, since her affair with DeHaan seems like the bargaining any victim does after a sexual assault.

This does pose the question of what Alicia Vikander would look like if she actually seemed to give a fig. Fortunately this has been asked and answered in the substantially better version of Tulip Fever called The Light Between Oceans. You would honestly be forgiven for thinking this 2016 jaunt wasn't the same movie as Tulip Fever, the key difference being that Michael Fassbender was fresh off Shame and even the tips of his finger signified for penises at that time. The guy was electric in everything then.

DeHaan looks like a little boy seducing a thirty-year-old instead of an actually talented painter. His scenes with Christoph Waltz never come to very much; the older man is simply hiring the most talented, cheapest painter he can find. Waltz is very comfortable in his sociopath mode, except it turns out that he is simply a well-meaning sort of man who forces his wife into sex. This bizarre rationalization makes Tulip Fever into a somewhat cynical portrait of the depravity people accept into their lives without even meaning to.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Represent The Danish Girl In A Different Way

Gerda's Wife

by DICK CHENEY

The Danish Girl
dir. Tom Hooper
119 minutes

Eddie Redmayne's penis is a solid eight inches long. His wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) kisses his navel and makes a motion like she is wanting to put this beastly, perfect thing in her mouth. He shakes her off like a catcher asking for the the curveball, not the fastball, or maybe not wanting any balls whatsoever. 

I was born with a penis. It is nowhere near the gargantuan size of Eddie Redmayne's penis. No one would ever cut off a penis the size of Eddie Redmayne's penis, certainly no one with any appreciation of aesthetics. After Eddie Redmayne starts dressing up like a turn-of-the-century Kathy Griffin, he gives up his life as a painter. He's not into art as much anymore. The focus must be on tucking his penis under his nutsack — but the thing is so big it just comes out the back. 

No one is even that surprised by how big this penis is, or even mentions it. Why show it off if it is not even a plot point? The Danish Girl has two dozen evocative images of Denmark and Paris, and yet there is nothing in this cynical, false film about how beautiful the human body is.

At one point Alicia Vikander shows off her tight ass and Eddie Redmayne covers her up. He is maybe more into dress-up than choosing one particular identity, we surmise. Turning gender identity into a kind of fashion game is merely one way director Tom Hooper planned to mangle this true story. After turning Les Misérables into a silly kind of costume show, he must have figured, I already butchered a great novel: why not history as well?

Since Gerda is not getting any sex or intimacy from her wife, who demands to be called Lili, she meets an art dealer (Matthias Schoenaerts) who refuses to buy or sell any contemporary art. "That's okay," Gerda says, explaining she really only wants a friend. At one point in the seemingly interminable two hours of The Danish Girl, she allows the man, whose name is Hugh, to kiss her salty, tear-stained face. A kiss and no more: the echoes of Cinderella are quite prominent in The Danish Girl, and deeply unflattering to Eddie Redmayne, who would be the wicked stepmother. 

Sex is not allowed here, even in a movie that principally concerns the subject of gender. IRL Gerda married some douchebag who took all her money, not a man who is a Louis Vuitton model when he is not wetting his lips and befriending the wives of transgender individuals. Fudging the truth is the province of biopics, but this falsehood is nearly unforgivable, since it changes the ending of the story completely. 

The Danish Girl is therefore a fake, and not even an entertaining one, since whatever Gerda and Hans share, it is not really touched on. Vikander dominates every scene in The Danish Girl all by her lonesome, seemingly trying to singlehandedly make up for all the cisgender men in this movie. Vikander is normally expert at conveying quiet pain, and the role of a spurned wife gives her a chance to be more demonstrative than usual. She is convincing as Gerda until she has to do tearful scenes on the eve of Eddie Redmayne's penis surgery. Then The Danish Girl feels like a Mitch Albom chapter, and not a very convincing one. 

I don't think I ever did a review of The Theory of Everything. It was tragically bad, but at least Redmayne had to keep down his absurd overacting because Stephen Hawking only possessed so many potential facial expressions. He completely butchers this entire movie with bizarre preening and blinking, like he actually believes the entire idea of being a woman is basically to open and close as fast as you can, like a flower producing pollen. 

And I mean, fuck you. Redmayne takes his big dick into a peep show booth, where he pantomines the movements of strippers. Because that is all a woman is. Instead of studying his wife, he has to practice his femininity in brothels. These scenes are not only boring and affected, they are so ancient as to become a cliché. Do you have any idea how stupidly reductive this shit is? It's mean-spirited, too, like we are supposed to think: what a selfish child to be worried about how she touches her face, while her marriage splinters and tears apart!

Gerda achieves tons of fame and income from her paintings of Redmayne when he is dressed up as Lili. No one can possibly penetrate this disguise, even though Redmayne's drag is five or six significant steps down from Mrs. Doubtfire. Between these lame scenes of Redmayne trying to pass with foundation, a little bit of lipstick and a hat, Hooper shows us the inspiration for the paintings of a generation. In doing so he represents this distinctive visual medium as merely representative, abdicating a key role. Yet he cannot even manage this simple translation of the life of Ms. Elbe.

We would be ecstatic to merely have the truth; it is the bare minimum to which any audience is entitled. If only this hack director would absorb the tiniest bit of integrity from secretions of his star's prominent phallus, and say what really happened.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Beating Me Up" - Rachel Platten (mp3)

"Fight Song" - Rachel Platten (mp3)

In Which We Cried Uncle Almost Continuously Throughout

The Robot From Ex-Machina

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
dir. Guy Ritchie
121 minutes

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a lot more interesting if you imagine that Gabby (Alicia Vikander) is a corpse. Then Guy Ritchie's revival of an equally horrid television series would start to take on a genre-bending Weekend at Bernie's-esque feel. This state of affairs is accentuated by the fact that Vikander barely ever smiles in The Man From U.N.C.L.E, or speaks louder than a whisper. In that way, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. can be thought of as a spiritual sequel to Alex Garland's Ex-Machina.

It turns out that Vikander is a spy for the British, which incidentally also happened in the latest Mission: Impossible. The British employ lots of women as spies — otherwise they would just waste away with nothing in particular to do like Bridget Jones or Margaret Thatcher.

Hugh Grant looks like a totem pole. He doesn't appear until an hour into The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and it comes as a considerable relief since the accents of an imposingly sexual Henry Cavill and a completely bland Arnie Hammer are quite difficult to understand. (The two leads violate a major principle of casting which is that no heroes should look alike.)

Grant's major virtue is that he is easy to fathom. The only person who did not understand exactly who he was is Elizabeth Hurley, and that was chiefly because of her own vanity. Even though Cavill and Hammer's characters are supposed to be deft spies, they have no idea what is happening in this turgid plot either. Even when Cavill is tasked with killing Hammer, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. doesn't become entertaining.

Hammer's Ilya Kuryakin gets the poor end of the stick by far. Vikander seems extremely disgusted to be involved in a romantic plotline with him, especially when he creepily strokes her leg. Plus, next to the immense work of art that is Henry Cavill, he looks like the shrimp in a bodybuilding ad. Foreign accents have never been Ritchie's strong suit — I still don't understand half the dialogue in Snatch — and Hammer's Russian brogue is all over the map. All this could be forgiven if The Man From U.N.C.L.E. looked good, but it does not.

Style should be the cornerstone of any fan service, and yet none of the people in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. have it. Their suits are shades of brown and black arranged too closely together; Vikander at different times resembles a puffin fish or an owl. No one comes across stylishly, not even the villain (Elizabeth Debicki). Possibly if Ritchie was still married to Madonna, she might have advised him of the general weakness in this aesthetic:

It emerges that the agents involved in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. are fighting some kind of post-Nazi plot. This twist sets a record, making the Third Reich far and away the most cinematic mass movement ever created. The Reich is supposed to possess a defective personal style, but in contrast to their slipshod pursuers, they have never come across more sympathetically. As menacingly dull as the plot of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is, it was substantially better than the last Superman feature.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Wonder Why You Hide" - Caspar Babypants (mp3)

"Day Is Gone" - Caspar Babypants (mp3)