A fun cross-cultural spoof, with a bright-lights New Yorker writer turning his trip to West Texas into a podcast, like he’s visiting a zoo, only to find that the animals can not only talk but have a lot on their minds. The lesson in self-awareness is less interesting than the characters he runs into, and if the plot is a little pat you can still admire its intricacy. The film didn’t have much wallop on TV, but it provided plenty to think about. Ashton Kutcher stands out.
A textbook example of “slow cinema,” which features long takes and nothing happening, Showing Up does not much more than its title. Michelle Williams plays a joyless depressive from a dysfunctional family who jousts with an unpleasantly aggressive Hong Chau. The main plot point involves a pigeon, which for director Kelly Reichardt is a step down from her previous films about a dog and a cow.
A small movie, like the best Vermeer paintings, and if not a similar masterpiece, one that told a fun story with clarity and the borrowed beauty of all the Vermeers. Just showing close-ups of the paintings in the Rijksmuseum exhibition would have been worth the admission price, but beyond the final show were two subplots involving two contested paintings. While the Rijksmuseum ultimately accepted both as authentic, in one case over the opinion of the National Gallery in Washington, the film left me with serious doubts about the other, a work owned by Thomas Kaplan, who was among the many participants skillfully shown. The movie increased my appreciation of Vermeer, which is hard to do.
Ladies ruled the stage for our spring visit to New York, with the Tony going to Jodie Comer in Prima Facie, a legal delicacy and one-woman tour de force. Jessica Chastain was formidable in a necessarily smaller but no less affecting role in A Doll’s House. Jessica Hecht and Laura Linney complemented each other in the David Auburn two-hander, Summer, 1976. As much as I love Linney, I could see why Hecht’s performance garnered the Tony nomination instead. Based on pre-play blurbs, I expected Juliet Stevenson to round out this all-star list of female leads, but I was so turned off by her unmodulated harshness and unpleasant character in The Doctor that I left at intermission. As a footnote I should include Lucy Roslyn’s one-woman performance in the off-Broadway Orlando. She was attractive and good at what she was doing, but the play, which she also wrote, didn’t connect.
Then there were the ensemble productions. Fat Ham was the cleverest, with a slew of hilariously winning characters and winking nods to Shakespeare. Thanksgiving Play carried a not-so-subtle post-woke message but was too unsubtle for my taste. New York, New York was our shot at a good old-fashioned musical, but the trite plot, unmemorable songs and dull characters overcame the excellent choreography and drove us out at halftime.
A movie of small moments, two couples in Manhattan with regular Manhattan jobs, like we used to get from Woody Allen. No guffaws, but lots of little laughs and a pleasant ride along a low-key plot. For me, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was too much “Elaine” to be convincing or particularly interesting and the happy ending was forced, but in all this was good company to keep and a solid addition to the Nicole Holofcener library.
Cleverly put together by Davis Guggenheim, this assisted autobiography features movie clips, simulated scenes and documentary footage on an armature of director-subject interview. All credit to Michael J. Fox for exposing himself and publicizing the plight of Parkinson’s patients, and he is ever charming and captivating. I still felt something was missing, that we were just skimming the surface – of his career, of his real life, of his condition. And the many scenes of his therapy just made me wonder what help the average Parkinson’s patient, such as my friends, receive.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are having a great time, and the audience does too. It’s an inspirational story about Nike taking a chance on Michael Jordan as a rookie. There’s not much subtlety, but what’s wrong with that? We already know the ending and most of what happens along the way; our pleasure comes from how the story is told and the familiar actors who tell it: in addition to Damon and Affleck, there’s Justin Bateman, Viola Davis, Chris Messina, Chris Tucker and Matthew Maher, all wonderful. And, in a smart move, they leave Michael Jordan out of it.
Hip Hooray for Sally Hawkins and Ye Merrie Olde England (or Scotland)! So much fun to watch an old-fashioned movie with plot, good guys and bad guys, real-life situations and nary an art-house pretension. Instructive too, as it was “based on a true story,” although director Stephen Frears took plenty of license, as did Shakespeare before him. Steve Coogan was a wonderful husband, the kids were remarkably pleasant and the mansplaining bad guys were more twits than villains.
Willem Dafoe couldn’t leave because he was locked inside a billionaire architect’s apartment after an art theft went awry, but what was my excuse? The film’s premise discouraged any hope of a happy or good ending, but surely something interesting would happen? It turned out to be nothing more than a Greek/Belgian/German art-house production that, perhaps for obscure art-house reasons, was set in New York and starred an American actor. Was it a comment on the obscenely rich? the value of Art? the need for human connection? Architecture and Design? Man’s ingenuity? the human body? Where most films leave me wondering, where and when do the characters go to the bathroom?, this movie, unfortunately, spelled it out.
In anticipation of tomorrow’s awards show I watched the five nominated Documentary Shorts and rate them as follows:
© Copyright 2019 Robert Marshall | All Rights Reserved.