Marriage Story – 7

/0 Comments/in /by

Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver both give remarkably sensitive portrayals of a couple who love each other but can’t get along, and your sympathy slides from one to the other in the world of grey that real people inhabit. Everyone else, oddly enough, is a caricature. This sets the stars apart but ultimately cheapens the movie. Many stretches of the film were painful to watch – undoubtedly Noah Baumbach’s intention but not something I enjoyed. And I didn’t need the blood-letting scene.

Knives Out – 7.9

/0 Comments/in /by

As opposed to JoJo Rabbit, which tried – unsuccessfully, in my view – to mix slapstick with serious matter, Knives Out never faltered from its tone: spoof. The whodunit plot clicked into place marvelously, and all the characters got what they deserved , unless you consider the 85-year-old patriarch’s slitting his throat to have been a tad premature. And when I say “spoof,” I don’t mean silly, for there was an undertone of message – as in, being greedy and selfish isn’t the best way to get along with others. Daniel Craig with a Southern drawl set the bar, and all the other actors limboed joyfully under.

JoJo Rabbit – 6.5

/0 Comments/in /by

An inventive mishmash of relationships with different, and largely incompatible, tones: JoJo and his friend Yorkie – traditional comic; JoJo and his mother (Scarlett Johansson, why?) – serious and tragic; JoJo and Adolf Hitler – absurdist comic; JoJo and Elsa – sweetly romantic; JoJo and Captain K (wonderful Sam Rockwell) – slapstick; JoJo and Jews – uncomfortable. Indeed, the whole “Hogan’s Heroes” view of World War II doesn’t really work when we see the Gestapo chasing Jews, collaborators being hanged and soldiers dying in the street. (I didn’t like Life Is Beautiful, either, for this reason.)

The Irishman – 7.5

/0 Comments/in , /by

Robert DeNiro is an emotional black hole at the center of this 3-hour gangster epic. He is the narrator, speaking (to whom?) from a wheelchair in his nursing home, but I never felt anything from or about his extraordinary journey from trucker to hitman to union boss to convict to relic, not from his relationships to his wife and daughters, nor his allegiance and betrayal of Jimmy Hoffa. There are cold-blooded murders aplenty in the movie, with “cold” being the operative word. First, I never saw DeNiro as “Frankie Sheeran.” He was always Robert DeNiro. The twinkly smirk identified the actor, not the character, and I kept waiting for DeNiro the comic over-the-top performer to break out. Second, he wasn’t even remotely Irish. There was more anguish in 20 seconds of Banderas in Pain and Glory than 180 minutes of DeNiro here. You wonder if Scorsese centered his film on DeNiro because they have been friends since they were 16 and the younger DeNiro meant so much to Scorsese’s career, which he was now summing up.

In contrast, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci were wonderful, as the only other characters with any depth of personality. There were scores of others – the credits go on for days – but all of them, especially the wives, are just colorful Post-It notes stuck on DeNiro’s story. The film often plays as a documentary: mobsters are introduced, with their eventual fates superscripted, more for historical “accuracy” than for dramatic purposes. The movie’s structure itself is anti-drama, as the plot rolls on for quite awhile after the main story ends, sort of like life.

Meeting Gorbachev/ Apollo 11

/0 Comments/in /by

During my Delta flight to Atlanta I caught up on two notable documentaries of summer 2019, one notable for its narrator, the other for not having one. I am a longtime fan of Werner Herzog’s films and inquiring mind, but not so much that I appreciated his equal billing with the former Soviet leader. Not only did we have to see and watch Herzog’s ponderous interviewing, but when the movie moved beyond “Mikhail Sergeyevich’s” answers we were led by Herzog’s voice-over. Gorbachev played a hugely important and little understood role in world history, and it felt a little uncomfortable to see him treated as a curiosity in a senior-citizen home.

Apollo 11, which boasted unseen footage of the historic 1969 moon mission, was wildly dramatic, even though the story was well known and the outcome was never in doubt. This illusion was aided by the absence of any knowing voice from the present. All the dialogue was taken from contemporaneous TV interviews, tapes of mission participants and the resonant broadcasts of Walter Cronkite, giving a “You Are There” feel to the proceedings. Finally, one couldn’t help but marvel at the still-amazing feat of sending men to the moon, with a small side question of “Who was Neil Armstrong?”

 

Pain and Glory – 8

/0 Comments/in /by

In what is both the cleanest and most brightly colored movie of the year, Pedro Almodovar gives a hauntingly autobiographical glimpse of the creative process – its sources, its pressures, its resolutions. The incomparable Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz, plus the wildly coiffed Asier Exteandia, never let your intentions stray as the story flashes forward, flashes back and swirls in linear fashion.  At the end, as in Proust (and Patricia Selbert’s House of Six Doors), we reach the beginning of the story we’ve just been watching.

Parasite – 5.5

/0 Comments/in , /by

Bizarre. Part absurdist comedy, part horror film, part sociological commentary, none of it strikes an emotional chord or makes you think too much. The vibe is similar to Jordan Peele’s movies (Get Out and particularly Us), but there’s no one to root for and the story is full of holes: e.g., how can the son end up the hero after we saw his head bashed in, lying in a puddle of his blood? Maybe the movie would make more sense for a Korean audience, but if this is our glimpse into Korean culture I don’t feel I’m missing much.

The Sound of My Voice – 8

/0 Comments/in /by

A total upper of a movie. Her current Parkinson’s aside, Linda Ronstadt was presented as having a charmed life: great voice, wonderful friends, happy relationships, good career moves. And with it all, she was humble. None of the preening, drugs, breakups, bad managers and falls from grace that marked every other rock bio seen lately. Her songs never sounded better and her cast of admirers was a good bunch: Jackson Browne, Cameron Crowe, Emmylou Harris, Waddy Wachtel, et al. I’m not sure how historically accurate the story was – I seem to remember her being immensely popular when the film suggested she was struggling or little-known – but when you’re smiling all the time, who cares?

Theater Thumbnails

/0 Comments/in /by

We gambled on eight not-yet-reviewed plays/musicals as the fall 2019 season kicked off on and near-Broadway. Four were total successes and four not so much.

Linda Vista was the most traditional of the bunch, in structure and production. Totally enjoyable, lots of humor – both intelligent and bawdy – and characters you could discuss and disagree about. A well acted, slow-motion tragedy that was very funny.

The Sound Inside. A simple, spare two-hander, with Mary-Louise Parker as a Yale English professor and the similarly remarkable Will Hochman as her troubled freshman advisee. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment  was the sinister subtext  for a compelling psychological drama.

The Inheritance, Part I. Innovative stagecraft, interesting characters and a meaty dissertation on being gay. It took a while to set its hook, but by the end the soap opera had enmeshed me. The stage was empty but the world was full and rich with young men we cared about.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning. A Big Chill of fundamentalist conservatives; very much a play of thought-provoking exposition, with four nicely unbalanced protagonists whose individual stories we pieced together as we grappled with their alien worldview. An intimate production that drew us in while holding us away.

Moulin Rouge. A lot of bombast, not much soul. With its random rifling of the rock library, it came across as a commercial reboot of Phantom of the Opera, which was pretty commercial to begin with. The sets, costumes and dancing were all sensational; I just didn’t care for or about any of the characters or their plights.

Tina. This showed promise up through “I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” although no ground was being broken. Then our star, Adrienne Warren, fell, quickly followed by the curtain; and when her understory gamely took over the role Tina’s amazing voice was gone. “River Deep, Mountain High” was a disappointment, and the show couldn’t carry less than a star.

The Great Society. A rehash of LBJ’s years as president, touching bases left and right. Brian Cox played LBJ as a one-note character, and there was nothing to be learned from a superficial reenactment of  times I lived through. This came across as more an encyclopedia entry than a play.

The Inheritance, Part II. Where Part I was fireworks shooting off in all directions, Part II was a one-dimensional downer, repetitive and maudlin (background music on Broadway, really?). All the points about gay life and the characters’ personalities had been made in the first 3-1/2 hours, and I got tired of the tawdry, the failed loves, the deaths and disappointments, notwithstanding a happy ending that didn’t fit.

Caesar and Cleopatra. Not a new play, and one we jumped on after a favorable review. Like our experience with O’Casey at the Irish Rep last spring, seeing a company devoted to Bernard Shaw was a good balance to the theater of today. This was a history lesson combined with a drama class, and a whole lot of fun.

 

First Love – 8

/0 Comments/in /by

This kind of hilarious, over-the-top gangster flick is probably common in Japan (indeed, the director Takashi Miike has made almost 100 movies himself), but its sensibility is a rare treat for a New York audience (not to mention Santa Barbara). The casual violence (heads literally rolling), the tough-guy gangster attitude, the all-out gang war are direct modern descendants of the great samurai films of Kurosawa and Mifune. (They even throw in a samurai sword duel as homage.) The story, too, has been told many times before: two innocents – the “first love” of the title – find themselves pursued by three sets of bad guys who mistakenly believe they are hiding a big shipment of meth. Once you figure out who is who, the race to the end is pure joy.