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Archive for April, 2016

“MOTHER’S DAY”: Emotional porn

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on April 28, 2016| 1 Comment »

Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Aniston

“MOTHER’S DAY”  My rating: C- 

118 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

Like its predecessors — “Valentine’s Day,” “New Year’s Eve” and the inexplicably adored  “Love Actually”  — “Mother’s Day” is low-risk, high-profit drek.

From a film producer’s point of view it’s a no brainer.  Take a half dozen interlacing plots on a central theme, populate them with big names (none of whom have to work too hard, since each is on screen for only a few minutes), pave the way with lightweight comedy and wrap it all up with a saccharine coda.

Jason Sudiekis

Jason Sudeikis

Plus, it’s a lazy moviegoer’s dream come true. There’s no commitment required because the enterprise is pure dramatic shorthand. No character or narrative arc is sustained  long enough to be anything more than a blip, and the film delivers a sentimental rush without the viewer having to invest anything.

In other words, emotional porn.

The latest from director Garry Marshall and his team of writers (Tom Hines, Lily Hollander, Anya Kochoff, Matthew Walker) follows a group of Atlanta residents as they look forward to — what else? — Mother’s Day.

Divorcee Sandy (Jennifer Aniston) is all abother because her ex (Timothy Olyphant) has wed a trophy gal half his age…and now this new stepmom is a favorite of Sandy’s two young boys.

Sisters Jesse (Kate Hudson) and Gabi (Sarah Chalke) live next door to each other and are happily estranged from their domineering and hopelessly prejudiced mother. Jesse has married an East Indian M.D. (Asaif Mandvi), while Gabi is in a same-sex relationship.

Wouldn’t you know it?  Their covers are blown when unsuspecting Mom (the great Margo Martindale) and Dad (Robert Pine) come swooping down in their RV to share Mother’s Day with the girls. (more…)

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“THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY”: Clothes make the institution

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Rhiannon struts her stuff on the red carpet

Rihanna struts her stuff on the red carpet

“THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY” My rating: B 

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Very few of us have the connections or the cash to participate in the Costume Institute Gala, one of the major fundraisers of NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Thanks to ‘s “The First Monday in May,” though, we can vicariously crash this celebrity-studded and glamor-heavy event.

For his latest documentary director Andrew Rossi (“Page One: Inside the New York Times”) delivers a grab bag of ideas and themes centering on fashion.

In part, the film is a history of the museum’s Costume Institute and the struggle to have fashion recognized as an art form worthy to stand alongside painting and sculpture.

It also looks back at the blockbuster show several years back featuring the bizarro fashion of the late Alexander McQueen, and efforts by Gala organizers to top that record-setting event.

Rossi’s camera centers on several individuals who are planning this massive undertaking, which for 2015 has been dubbed “China: Through the Looking Glass.” The massive production will illustrate how Western (and some Eastern) designers have drawn upon traditional Chinese art for inspiration.

(more…)

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“LOUDER THAN BOMBS”: Left behind

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Jesse Eisenberg, Devin Druid

Jesse Eisenberg, Devin Druid

“LOUDER THAN BOMBS” My rating: B+

109 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Louder Than Bombs” is a sort of ghost story, though not of the white-sheet-bump-in-the-night variety.

The first American film from Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier is a quietly devastating study of a father and two sons cut adrift by the death — a suicide, it turns out — of their wife and mother, and how they are haunted by memories, doubts and uncertainties.

Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert, seen in flashbacks and dream sequences) was a photojournalist who specialized in war coverage, not so much of the fighting as of its human toll. Two years have passed since her late-night death in a car crash just miles from her suburban New York home.

Her husband, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), a former actor now a teacher, has tried to keep his boys on an even keel. The oldest, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) is a sociologist with his first university teaching appointment, a wife and a new baby girl.

The younger, Conrad (Devin Druid), is a brooding, uncommunicative loner who refuses to give his concerned father the time of day. It probably doesn’t help that Gene is on the faculty of Conrad’s high school, and thus always lurking just around the corner.

A gallery retrospective of Isabelle’s work is being planned by a journalist colleague  (David Strathairn), whose essay about his deceased friend specifically names her as a suicide.  While Jonah has long been aware of this, Conrad is still under the impression that her death was a random accident. Gene must find a way to tell him the truth.

There’s no shortage of pain in the screenplay by Trier and Eskil Vogt, but also a great deal of love. This achingly humanitarian work lacks a villain — in fact, all three men and the late Isabelle have their own flaws and frustrating facets. (more…)

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“PAPA HEMINGWAY IN CUBA”: Lion in winter

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Giovanni Ribisi, Adrian Sparks

Giovanni Ribisi, Adrian Sparks

“PAPA HEMINGWAY IN CUBA”  My rating: C+

134 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Papa Hemingway in Cuba” has a terrific back story.

In fact, how the film got made is considerably more interesting than the movie itself.

Director Bob Yari (up to now he’s had mostly producing credits), working from a semi-autobiographical screenplay from the late journalist Denne Bart Petitclerc, filmed his feature in Cuba despite the economic embargo imposed by the United States more than a half-century ago.  “Papa”  is the first American film shot in that island nation since Castro’s communist revolution in 1959.

Moreover, Petitclerc had an intimate relationship with the volatile author and his wife, Mary Hemingway, and his yarn drops a couple of bombshell revelations which feel like dramatic license but which Petitclerc’s widow claims are based on real events.

The picture begins with Petitclerc’s fictional alter ego, Ed Myers (Giovanni Ribisi), writing an unabashed fan letter to Hemingway. The Miami newspaperman is at first skeptical when he gets a telephone call from a man claiming to be Ernest Hemingway. But it’s the real deal, and “Papa” invites the young man to visit him in his Havana retreat.

The invitation leads to repeated visits to Cuba and a deepening relationship between Ed, Papa (Adrian Sparks) and Mary Hemingway (Joely Richardson). Ed is initially cowed by the couple’s bohemian lifestyle (skinny-dipping in the pool, all-night drinking sessions) but slowly fits in  with the Hemingways’ literary/political crowd.

As an insider Ed is privy to both the inspiring and the appalling sides of the Hemingway legend. Papa is a great literary mentor; he’s also an egoist, a  macho-infused drunk, and though only  in his late 50s, sexually impotent.

All this simmering upheaval takes place against a background of even greater unrest. Castro’s revolutionaries are a growing threat to the Batista regime, which responds with ever more repressive policies.

(more…)

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“MILES AHEAD”: Genius in crisis

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis

“MILES AHEAD”  My rating: B 

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

You’ve got to give props to Don Cheadle.

As  the director, producer, co-writer and star of “Miles Ahead,” he shrugs off the trappings of your traditional musician biopic and attempts the cinematic version of  a jazz composition: repeated motifs, variations, codas, wild riffs, crazy improv.

It’s an approach guaranteed to scare off most audiences, but for those willing to stick around there are plenty of rewards.

The life of Miles Davis — as filled with personal upheaval as it was with musical genius — could be approached in a dozen different ways. Screenwriters Cheadle and Steven Baigelman have chosen a tack guaranteed to piss off many Davis fans by concentrating on perhaps the least productive and most demeaning period of the trumpeter’s career.

Set mostly  in late 1970s — almost three decades after his breakthrough as a “cool” jazz man and years since his last recording — the film does offer flashbacks of Miles’ wonder years, as well as his doomed romance with dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), presented here as the lost love of his life.

But in the here and now  Miles is holed up in Howard Hughes-ish isolation in his New York townhouse, where he lounges about in expensive yet ridiculous disco fashions, snorting coke and slugging back expensive liquor. Sometimes he fools around with recorded sounds, but creativity has little room in a life awash with paranoia and self-pity.

As one observer comments, at this point Miles Davis is probably worth more dead than alive.

The plot kicks in with the arrival of David Brill (Ewan McGregor), who claims to be on an assignment from Rolling Stone.  As it turns out, the journalist becomes Miles’ wingman on a series of odd adventures, foremost among them the theft from Miles’ home of a tape recording an unscrupulous music producer thinks could be worth a fortune.

Armed to the teeth and fueled by drugs, Miles and the bewildered/fascinated David go off to seek justice.

(more…)

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“A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING”: Stranger in a strange land

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on April 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »

***, Tom Hanks

Alexander Black, Tom Hanks

“A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING” My rating: B+ 

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Tom Tykwer’s “A Hologram for the King” begins with what appears to be a music video.

Tom Hanks, in suit and tie, is moving through a suburban neighborhood singing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” As he cover the song’s lyrics — “You may find yourself looking for your large automobile; you may find yourself without a beautiful house, without a beautiful wife…” –those objects of middle-class American happiness and stability vanish in clouds of garish purple smoke.

What the hell kind of movie is this, anyway?

Well, it’s a pretty great one, actually, although its charms are slow in developing.

That musical interlude, it turns out, is a dream that businessman Alan Clay (Hanks) is having while napping on a jet bound for Saudi Arabia. He awakens to find himself in the middle of an Islamic religious ceremony. He’s the only person on board not dressed in white and making a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Alan, whose career and marriage both have hit rock bottom, is trying to start over. He’s landed a job with a huge American telecommunications firm and is en route to Saudi Arabia to make a presentation of his firm’s latest technical innovation, a communications system that allows callers to converse with a life-size, three-dimensional hologram of the person on the other end of the line. The Saudi king will personally choose the winning bid; the job will be worth millions.

Being a can-do sort of guy and a born salesman, Alan hopes to reverse his business fortunes. Things aren’t so easily fixed in the marriage department. His ex wife  hates his guts. Mostly Alan feels guilty because he can no longer pay for college for his adoring daughter (Tracey Fairaway), who has dropped out and taken a job waitressing.

From the minute he touches down, things start going wrong. Alan has a killer case of jet lag and keeps missing the shuttle to the city of the future out in the desert where he’s to make his presentation. The Saudi bigwigs with whom he is supposed to meet have made themselves scarce and the three American technicians already on site are working out of a huge tent where there’s no wi-fi, inadequate air conditioning, and nothing to eat.

It’s going to be a disaster. Except that it also may be the greatest experience of Alan Clay’s life.

(more…)

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“BORN TO BE BLUE”: Blue-eyed jazz

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 14, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker

“BORN TO BE BLUE” My rating: B

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

We are introduced to musician Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) in a filthy jail cell. He’s lying on the concrete floor in a fetal position, sweat pouring off him, surrounded by cigarette butts. He seems to be going through heroin withdrawl.

So we know from the getgo that “Born to Be Blue,” Canadian filmmaker Robert Budreau’s feature about the “James Dean of jazz,” is going to be a rough ride.

Trumpeter/vocalist Baker (1929-1988) is famed as the inventor of West Coast swing. He is also the very model of the white junkie jazz genius, his main competition for the title being the late Art Pepper.

“Born to Be Blue” isn’t a formal biopic. Rather, writer/director Bureau attempts something like Todd Hayne’s Bob Dylan-themed “I’m Not There.” Think of it as a fantasia on the life and loves of a terrific musician who was also a deeply flawed individual.

The junkie jazzman is hardly a new cinematic concept, but “Born…” benefits from what may be Hawke’s strongest performance. Chet Baker was a handsome, charismatic charmer who, when he wasn’t creating great music, was battling demons.

Watching Hawke’s work here, we realize why people were drawn to Baker, and why most eventually bailed.

The film begins in 1954 with the young Chet playing New York City, pursued by swooning bobbysoxers and desperate to earn the approval of his idols and competitors, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

In this black-and-white segment he picks up a beautiful black woman and takes her to his hotel suite, where she turns him on to heroin. Their buzz is interrupted when the woman (Carmen Ejogo, the Brit who played Coretta Scott King in “Selma”) breaks character and accuses Chet of ignoring their dialogue and improvising.

 

 

(more…)

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“EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!”: Long night’s journey into hangover

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 14, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Welcome to the Animal House

Welcome to the Animal House

“EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!” My rating: B 

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Nothing much happens in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” Nor is the film in any hurry to get there.

But that’s the movie’s charm.

Set in 1980 on the weekend before fall classes begin at the fictional Southeast Texas University, this rollicking comedy envisions how the high school athletes from Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” might deal with their first college experience.

Our hero is Jake (Blake Jenner), a lanky, smart and just-a-bit naive kid who looks like a young Matt Dillon.  Jake has landed a scholarship to play baseball at SETU. He’s been assigned to live with other players in a ratty, water-stained off-campus residence.

Any resemblance to “Animal House” is not coincidental.

Jake arrives as a couple of the upperclassmen are using a garden hose to fill a waterbed. The added weight threatens to bring down the kitchen ceiling. One resident doesn’t see the point: “It’s like having sex with a girl on top of another really fat girl.”

Jake and the other freshman players are welcomed to the club with good-natured hazing, practical jokes, and much loquacious philosophizing from Finn (Glen Powell), a fabulously entertaining chap who is part intellectual, part standup comic, and mostly party animal.

The older guys show the newbies the campus ropes. They cruise the dorm parking lots where the coeds are moving in.  They sample the night life:  a disco ballroom, a country/western dive, a punk rock club.

Along the way Jake meets a cute performing arts major (Zoey Deutch, daughter of actress Leah Thompson and director Howard Deutch) with whom he begins what might become a monumental romance.

 

(more…)

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“THE ADDERALL DIARIES”: Sins of the fathers

Posted in Uncategorized on April 14, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Ed Harris, James Franco

Ed Harris, James Franco

“THE ADDERALL DIARIES” My rating: C+ (Opens April 15 at Standees Theatre)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

For a good chunk of its running time “The Adderall Diaries” looks  like yet another drug-addicted-author-with-writer’s-block movie. And do we really need another one of those?

The upside is that if you stick with writer/director Pamela Romanowsky’s adaptation of Stephan Elliott’s 2009 crime memoir, it eventually pays off. Kind of.

Nestled in this tale of sex, drugs, self-righteousness and  self-hatred is a sobering lesson about who we think we are and how others see us, about parental concern and parental guilt.

The question is whether your average viewer can hang on long enough to get to the message.

As the film begins writer Elliott (James Franco) is coasting on the fame of his last book, a searing examination of his childhood as the son of a brutal father, and an adolescence spent on the streets or as a ward of the court.

But at a public reading from the tome, the proceedings are interrupted by an angry man — Elliott’s father (Ed Harris) — who announces that contrary to the best-seller’s assertions, he is not dead but very much alive.

“I should be getting royalties for this shit,” he yells. “You people are all fools.”

Not only does Daddy’s unexpected appearance threaten Elliott’s credibility as a nonfiction writer, it sets the author on a downward spiral. His agent (Cynthia Nixon) has secured a big publishing deal for his next book, but Elliott now finds he cannot write.

(more…)

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“MY GOLDEN DAYS”: Look back, with ruefulness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 14, 2016| Leave a Comment »

**,**

Quentin Dolmaire, Lou Roy-Lecollinet

“MY GOLDEN DAYS”  My rating: B- (Opens April 15 at the Tivoli)

123 minutes | MPAA rating: R

First love can be tough. If we’re lucky we can look back on it with fondness, even while acknowledging how we screwed it up.  Sometimes things go south and it’s really nobody’s fault.

Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Days” is a sequel to his 1996 breakthrough film “My Sex Life,” in which he gave us his big-screen alter ego, Paul Dedalus (Mathieu Amalric), a young intellectual  juggling several women.

The new film opens with Paul Dedalus (Amalric once again) returning to France after living most of his adult life in Russia.  Before he can get into the country, though, must have a sit-down with a government security man (Andre Dussollier) about why according to passport records he’s been living the last three decades in Israel.

This leads to the film’s first flashback, a bit of mini-espionage in which the teenage Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) used a high school field trip to the U.S.S.R. to smuggle documents to Jewish refuseniks.  He even gave his French passport to a young Jew his own age, and that man used it to relocate to Israel.  This segment plays like The Hardy Boys Do James Bond.

Once that business has been cleared up and the middle-aged Paul is free to reenter France, the second and more substantial of the film’s flashbacks kicks in.  In this one Paul is a college student who on a weekend break to visit his family falls for one of his younger sister’s friends, the pouty/sexy Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet).

(more…)

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