Archive for category: Reviews

Bruce Dern plays a Midwestern Lear in the role of a lifetime (I know, because I saw his other career highlights in a Film Festival tribute the next day) and June Squibb is an Oscar-worthy match for Jennifer Lawrence in an uncannily similar role; but what most intrigued me was the son, played uncomfortably by Will Forte. He let life push him around – is this why he sympathized with his father? – and in almost every scene I wondered, why is he doing this. At the end, he becomes uber-decisive, and the only thing I wondered about more than why this change was where did he get the money? This was a writer’s movie – one comedy sketch after another – painted on an empty black-and-white canvas, with the Nebraska sky providing most of the empty. The best thing was the depiction of how people, especially family, reacted to Woody’s sudden wealth. That nothing else made much sense was a minor drawback.

Frankly, I got a little tired of full-screen shots of Joaquin Phoenix’s face. They admirably conveyed his every thought and feeling, but his thoughts and feelings weren’t particularly interesting. What interest there was lay in Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice, a personal OS that provided Theodore’s love interest. Hearing Her develop a personality that reflected His input was fun to consider for awhile, but once she lit out on her own – a la 2001’s Hal – the concept lost credibility, and it lost me completely when She announced that she was in 643 other relationships simultaneously. In the end, I took away nothing.

Dull. A tear-jerker that failed to jerk any tears. Why was this movie of an Irish mother’s search for her lost son in America so unaffecting? Maybe because there was so little drama: finding the son turned out to be easy; so the search became a search for details about his life, which wasn’t very exciting. The potentially explosive story of the convent’s selling off babies to America then covering up the past was botched: other than one benighted sister, we couldn’t tell who was responsible or if anyone was really bad. Maybe it was the lack of chemistry between the two principals: Steve Coogan seemed a detached commentator, not a credible journalist; and while Judi Dench is a remarkable actress, it’s hard for someone so smart to play dumb convincingly without just coming across as cute. This was another example of a movie “based on true events” being less interesting than a story someone devised for the sake of entertainment.

It’s hard to be excited about a movie, however well-made, about such a loser. He looks depressing to begin with, his songs are depressing, and he constantly makes bad decisions – starting with taking his host’s escaped cat downtown on the subway instead of negotiating with the building’s super to keep the cat or let him back in the apartment. You know, before it happens, that everything he tries will turn out badly – so who wants to watch this? Not coincidentally, the best musical moment is a PP&M-style “500 Miles,” when Llewyn – even the name sounds like “loser” – is in the audience. The movie is so dirge-like I mistakenly thought it was filmed in black-and-white. And why did the movie open with one of the chronologically last scenes? The Coens can, deservedly, get away with anything; but, like Woody Allen, it’s too bad the results are so erratic.

Another exercise in style from producer Ridley Scott – not as extreme as The Counselor, but in the same vein. Our hero, played by Christian Bale, was the personification of Good: we didn’t see him reading to blind children in his spare time only because, between working two shifts in the steel mill, tending his dying father, covering the debts of his irresponsible brother and paying his debt to society for a crime that wasn’t really his fault, he had no spare time. His success at knocking off the personification of Bad was thoroughly incredible, but we didn’t much mind because Woody Harrelson’s portrayal of the villain was so much fun and the blue-collar-and-below atmosphere of the belching steel mill town and Deliverance-quality backwoods New Jersey was so well done. The movie was like a painting – a Grosz, an Ensor, a van Gogh: not the world as it exists, but an artistic vision.