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?
Marks for message, but as cinema it was overlong, lacking drama and repetitive–too many shots of an empty school corridor. Although it won the Oscar, I can think of four or five better documentaries at the recent SB Film Festival.
Director Baz Luhrman atones for his dismal 2022 biopic Elvis with a joyful homage based on concert and rehearsal footage from the early 1970s, when Elvis was the greatest showman of our lifetime. The documentary plays his songs complete and gives full play to his twinkling smile and kidding personality. There are just enough interjections of the offstage world to keep it real: the Army, marriage to Priscilla, the movies, Col. Tom Parker. But we’re spared the bloated, drugged-out late Elvis, while also getting only hints of the early avatar of rock’n’roll. What Luhrman gives us is the singer, the outfits, the hair, the mesmerizing, transporting effect on his female audience of a performer in full.
“Weird” is too mild a descriptor for this Yorgas Lanthimos-Emma Stone-Jesse Plemons excursion into George Saunders-like surreality. Nothing makes sense in a very consistent way, and there is a sobering moral in a final scene that must have doubled the production budget (unless it was AI-generated, which would also be appropriate). While the film was not “enjoyable,” Stone and Plemons were admirable.
Sometimes you just long for an old-fashioned movie with a linear plot, dialogue you can understand, a satisfying story arc and a character or two you can like or even connect with emotionally. Instead, Kristen Stewart’s first directorial effort seemed designed to establish her bona fides as an artsy auteur with the portrait of an abused, sex-crazed, irresponsible poet of no discernible talent who somehow survived to write the memoir on which the film was loosely based. Imogen Poots remarkably kept the film, and her head, above water.
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