The trouble with filming a “true story” is the viewer is always thinking, could this really have happened?, and in this case the mind generally thought, I don’t think so. On the fictional level, though, we were given a riveting performance by Andrew Scott that, however unlikely, kept us firmly involved, and of course the drama around D-Day is strong.
A thoroughly charming detective yarn spooled by sheep with personalities around humanoid caricatures. The many jokes made you feel good about getting them. The story was farfetched, but this is the first movie in several years that reduced me to tears at the end. A perfect way to spend a rainy Memorial Day Weekend Sunday morning.
The Fear of 13 came with a middling review and poor word-of-mouth but wasn’t that bad. The burgeoning relationship between the condemned prisoner (Adrien Brody) and the visiting volunteer (Tessa Thompson) was credible and charming and scenes with the company were engaging and fun. The legal story, however, didn’t make sense, and the play’s wrap-up final 15 minutes, accordingly, fell flat. As often happens when dealing with a true story, the writer/director thinks the facts speak for themselves even when, dramatically, they don’t. 6.5
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was a wonderful evocation of a time, place and culture; we thoroughly enjoyed it, even when we couldn’t understand the dialogue–who was “Joe Turner”? Cedric the Entertainer was missing for our performance, which perhaps diminished the heft of the lead, but Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s featured role as Bynum was seemingly more crucial, and he received a Tony nomination. August Wilson’s play, set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in the 1910s, is a classic, and it was played as such. (And anyone who thinks there isn’t a Black audience for Broadway should see this crowd!) 8.5
The Balusters refers to an item of architecture, not a dysfunctional family, but the setup is the same, only this time it’s a neighborhood association that cracks at every joint. The ten individuals cover every contemporary interest group, and their barbs and slights are unfailingly hilarious. As is the play. Once again we saw an understudy, and this time for the Tony nominee (Marylouise Burke), but her part was so small and the understudy so good we hardly noticed. The only cast member less than perfect–or maybe it was her role as written–was the nominal lead, Anika Noni Rose. There was plenty of timely acerb without her hard edge. 9
Fallen Angels is an acting tour-de-force by Rose Byrne and, exceptionally, Kelli O’Hara in an exquisitely engineered drawing-room comedy by Noel Coward. It shows its age–i.e., not relevant like The Balusters–but that adds to its charm. The setting took us back to our recent week in London, while the costume changes, sophisticate wit and pratfalls kept us glued to the action for an intermission-less almost two hours. 8
Becky Shaw is a well constructed roundelay of witty one-liners and stinging barbs in the dysfunctional-family genre. The problem for me was there was no way in to the world on stage, and the co-lead “Suzanna” (Lauren Patten) was the most annoying character I’ve come across this season. I don’t like whiners, but more to the point I couldn’t fathom why anyone else liked her either. “Max” (Alden Ehrenreich) was more interesting, but neither noble nor likable. In short, I could see the points made about relationship, but it wasn’t that great a time. 7.5
Death of a Salesman exists beyond my review as an American classic, the kind of play they don’t make anymore (could any new tragedy survive a Broadway opening these days?). I will say that the staging was terrific, Laurie Metcalf was impeccable and Nathan Lane fully inhabited his Willy Loman. The set was as dark as the play’s message. Not having other incarnations to compare or the text to read, I only wonder if the Loman character has to be such an unpleasant bully. He’s deluded and pathetic, but not in a way that elicits sympathy. How to put him out of his misery as painlessly as possible seems to be the tension that drives the play. 7.5
Kenrex is a tour de force in acting (by Jack Holden) and even moreso in production that tells a true crime story in the small rural town of Skidmore, Missouri. The first act introduces us to the town’s players, some unnecessarily, while act two ratchets up the tension. Holden’s portrayal of the town bully grabs your gut and the story plays out like a negative of High Noon: the lawman is the lone coward while the townspeople stand up. The epilogue, however, left us scratching our heads. 7
We saw three plays in London last week; each had a highlight, each left me with quibbles. Grace Pervades featured acting by Ralph Fiennes that took my breath away; Inter Alia had a provocative argument (or more) with no easy answer; Les Liaisons Dangereuses was simply a spectacular production.
Grace Pervades, David Hare’s 32nd play(!), provided a history of English theater in the late 19th century through the persons of Henry Irving (Fiennes) and Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison). There was more biography than drama, which was well enough for what it was. The subplots involving Terry’s two children added flesh to the story, although I found the acting by the lesbian trio a couple notches below the stars’. When I came across Irving’s portrait by Bastien-Lepage in the National Portrait Gallery later in the week, I felt I knew him.
Inter Alia’s Rosamund Pike has been praised so widely that she won’t mind my saying that I personally found her performance off-putting. She commanded the stage every second, and if she wasn’t talking frantically she was changing her costume. After half an hour, before the play’s plot point had even been introduced, I was thinking, “enough already!” I think I could still have been absorbed in the serious issues the play raised with a lot less frenzy on stage.
We saw Liaisons after a private backstage tour of the National Theatre, which provided context for the fabulous costumes and swirl of scenery the production offered, but no hint of the swooping choreography of the 18th-century courtiers that lifted the story above and beyond its sordid liaisons. When not dancing, unfortunately, the play came down to earth, and of the seven leads I enjoyed the company of but one. I wish Valmont (Aidan Turner) had not been so slimy and resistible, Marquise de Merteuil (Lesley Manville) not so aged, and the color-blind actors better actors. I was the furthest right in the eighth row of Lyttleton Theatre and still felt I had a good seat, adding to a very positive impression of the NT as an institution if not–after watching videos of The Importance of Being Earnest and War Horse–of its acting.
This would have been better on the stage, where the “art” and the overacting wouldn’t have been in my face. As it was, the only enjoyable moments in what is essentially a two-hander came from watching my TV buddy James Corden ham it up. Like Marty Supreme, Ian McKellen is presumably meant to be obnoxious, and he was.
An effective, if unintentional, prequel to No Other Land, with the British, instead of the Jews, dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland. Well made, with appealing characters, and although one-sided in its history it didn’t come across as propagandistic. Unfortunately, there is no happy ending.
A new take on the Lone-Samurai (ronin) character familiar from Yojimbo and Sanjuro. The bustling 18th-century setting is fun, but Kurosawa and Mifune are missing, and missed. The role of go was a bit hard to swallow, but worse was a lack of subtlety, more expected in a film from 1970 than 2024.
Four characters and their permutational relationships is the essence, indeed almost the totality, of this film. After all the bluff and bluster of American cinema, it’s refreshing to return to a European film, this directed by the German auteur Christian Petzold, with no special effects, hardly any scenery, no dramatic soundtrack, just real people coping. Paula Beer and Barbara Auer are quietly magnificent and inscrutable as the psychodrama gradually releases its information, leading to a surprising, but comforting, ending.
Took advantage of my wife’s absence to catch up on two critically lauded (Washington Post maybe?) films from the last two years and was glad she was away. Both were unwatchable, if for different reasons. In Peter Hujar’s Day nothing happens, which is intentional, but in the day he describes nothing happens, too. And for some inexplicable reason, it takes a full day, in the movie, for him to recount his yesterday. Ben Whishaw is charming as Peter Hujar, but I learned nothing about the character from the 75-minute conversation. (Then again, I didn’t like My Dinner with Andre either.) Eephus purports to film a rec league baseball game, but unless it is a metaphor for something or a dig at New Hampshire I have no idea what it is about. If you aren’t a baseball fan the movie would be incomprehensible. If you are a fan, like me, the representation of baseball is offensive. Bill “Spaceman” Lee makes a walk-on to pitch an inning, further muddying the opaque waters. What were they thinking–and how did this get a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (or Hujar a 91?)
Who needs good acting when you know where the Colleen Hoover formula plot is going. Maika Monroe is easy on the eyes, but the premise she embodies is wobbly: who sends a young woman with no record to jail for seven years when the car she’s driving hits a rock, rolls over and her fiance in the shotgun seat is killed? And why is her five-year-old daughter portrayed as a three-year-old?
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