Angelina Jolie, Lopuie Garrel
“COUTURE” My rating: C+(In theaters)
106 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Four women come to grips with their futures (and mortality) in Alice Winocour’s “Couture,” set in the Paris during Fashion Week.
The film is ambitious, wearing its feminism on its sleeve, but unfocused, with some of the characters developing genuinely involving situations and others merely treading water.
American filmmaker Maxine Walker (Anglina Jolie), who usually specializes in horror, has signed on to direct a short film to open the runway show of a major label. It’s a high-tension job in the best of circumstances, but Maxine has just discovered a health crisis that threatens to upend her life.
Ada (Anyier Anei) îs a naive 18-year-old refugee from the war in Sudan. Recruited by video, she soon finds herself both delighted and intimidated by the big city, especially the catty attitudes of the other models with whom she shares an apartment. She has a short learning curve but has to nail it…otherwise it’s back to a questionable fate in Africa.
Angele (Ella Rumpf) is a makeup artist kept busy zipping from one show top the next. Her real love, though, is writing. Early on an agent shoots down her manuscript and she now must come up with a new idea.
Finally there’s Garance Marillier as Christine, a young seamstress facing a deadline to finish work on the dress that will open her fashion house’s big show.
Of these four plot threads only Maxine’s is fully worked out. Faced with the need for an immediate surgery, she goes through all the stages of grief in just a couple of days. . The fact that Jolie is herself a breast cancer survivor gives extra oomph to her heart-wringing performance.
There are a couple of male roles…Vincent Lindon is quietly reassuring as Maxine’s new MD, and Louis Garrel is both sexy and sincere as a co-worker with who she has one last fling before surgery.
The highlight of the film — aside from Jolie’s perf — is it’s depiction of a runway show staged in a forest an nearly ruined by a thunderstorm.
Sam Rockwell (center)
“GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE” My rating: B (Hulu)
124 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Sam Rockwell gets the best opening scene of any movie in ages with “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” a mind-bender that’s part apocalyptic sci-fi, part fiendish social satire, and part action epic.
It’s late at night in a Los Angeles diner. There’s a flash of light outside the window and in walks the Man from the Future” (Rockwell), a bearded ragamuffin wrapped in a transparent raincoat and covered with wires, blinking lights and, it turns out, several bombs.
The Man greets the diners, calling some of them by name, even predicting what they’ll do or say next. He is, he says, from the future. This is the 117th time he’s appeared at the diner to recruit a half-dozen eaters to go on a mission to destroy the AI that is poised to ruin the world.
So far the Man and those he’s chosen to accompany him (they’re different on every iteration of the mission) have failed miserably…killed and apparently resurrected as time resets. But the sardonic, wise-cracking Man has to keep at it, learning from each mistake and getting ever closer to destroying the source of the electronic hell that is his future.
On this night he’ll find just the right combination of subjects to pull it all off. And through a series of clever flashbacks we’ll learn how these folk became qualified for the gig.
Mark and Janet (Michael Pena, Zazie Beetz) are high school teachers terrified that their cellphone-addicted students are just a text away from becoming a sort of zombie mob.
Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) is a bad-tempered goth girl who works as a fairy princess for little girls’ birthday parties. She’s allergic to most kinds of electronic gizmos…being too near a cell phone gives her a nosebleed.
Susan (Juno Temple) lost her teenage son to a school shooter. Recently she paid to have him cloned…though this new version of him is more robotic than human.
Together they will battle mysterious assassins, armies of hypnotized teenagers — even a giant creature that is part horse and part cat. But will they be able to stop the inexorable creep of the electronic “other”?
“Good Luck…” — written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski — is by turns funny and a bit frightening. Granted, it cannot keep up the high level of comedy/wonder that Rockwell establishes in the opening moments, but even in the slow moments it’s fun to watch.
And when it’s all over it leaves us satisfied, yet cautious. We’re led to believe that our heroes have stymied AI…but perhaps even their presumed victory has been staged as part of vast virtual reality experiment. Who knows?
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 