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Posts Tagged ‘Meryl Streep’

“THE PROM”: Don’t be gay in Indiana

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2020| 1 Comment »

Andrew Rannells, Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman

“THE PROM”  My rating: B+

130 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Sabre-toothed cynicism and squishy-hearted sentiment are unusual bedfellows, but they get it on quite swimmingly in “The Prom,” Ryan Murphy’s winning screen adaptation of the gay-centric Broadway musical.

Here’s a movie I’d pay to see in a theater.  And I say that from the depths of my pandemic-panicked heart.

Simultaneously a celebration/sendup of show-biz hamminess and a touching coming-out story, “The Prom” depicts how a handful of Broadway has-beens and wannabes descend upon a tiny Indiana burg to champion the cause of a teenage lesbian named Emma (a winning Jo Ellen Pellman) who only wants to take her gal to the high school prom.

That simple desire is complicated. First, because the PTA president Mrs. Greene (Kerry Washington) would rather cancel the prom than let a gay couple attend; second because Emma’s squeeze is none other than Mrs. Greene’s daughter Alyssa (Ariana DeBose), who is yet to come out to her mom.

Meanwhile in New  York, Broadway diva Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) has been trashed for  her new musical about Eleanor Roosevelt.

“What didn’t they like?” asked co-star Barry Glickman (James Corden), who plays FDR. “Was it the hip hop?”

Actually, no.  The critics find Dee Dee and Barry to be insufferably narcissistic. They need an image makeover, something that will let them “love ourselves but appear to be caring human beings.”  Hey, what if they help out that little gay girl in Indiana?

They are joined on their mission  by Angie Dickinson (Nicole Kidman), who after 20 years in the biz is still stuck in the chorus, and actor/bartender Trent Oliver (Andrew Rannells), whose career high point is his degree from Juilliard.

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“LITTLE WOMEN”: Growing up

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 24, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen

“LITTLE WOMEN” My rating: B+

134 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Each generation, apparently, gets its own cinematic “Little Women.” Count Greta Gerwig’s new version among the best.

Beautifully acted, classily mounted and delivering its emotional detonations with almost clocklike precision, this adaptation manages to do justice to Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel while viewing the tale through a protofeminist lens.

Gerwig lets us know what she’s up to in the opening scene, where aspiring writer Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) meets with a New York publisher to discuss her latest story.

“If the main character is a girl,” the bewhiskered editor (Tracy Letts) advises, “make sure she’s married by the end…or dead.  Doesn’t matter which.”

This is only the first of several moments in which the film takes aim at male privilege and arrogance in 19th century America (and, by implication, in today’s world).  Not that the film ever mounts a soapbox or goes strident.  Gerwig’s screenplay effortlessly incorporates a modern sensibility into the classic tale; it feels as if she discovered these  millennial attitudes  in the original story and merely amplifies them.

This “Women” is novel as well for its narrative juggling.  The film opens several years after the Civil War…the March sisters from Concord, Mass., are now young adults.

We’ve already seen Jo pursuing a career in the Big Apple.  We find sister Meg (Emma Watson) back in Concord; she’s married, a mother and struggling with money issues.  Little sister Amy (Florence Pugh) is in France studying painting under the watchful eye of their wealthy Aunt March (Meryl Streep, doing her best Maggie Smith).

There’s a fourth sister, Beth (Eliza Scanlen), whom we meet in the flashbacks that make up the bulk of the film.  (One of the great pleasures in Gerwig’s narrative sleight-of-hand is that we’re able to compare the mature women we first meet with their much more innocent selves seven years earlier.)

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“MARY POPPINS RETURNS”: Flirting with Greatness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Emily Blunt

“MARY POPPINS RETURNS” My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Dec. 19)

130 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

First, the most obvious question: Is “Mary Poppins Returns” as good as the 1965 original?

Answer: No.  But  it comes close.

Disney’s original “Poppins” is one of — if not the — greatest family films of all time. Everything about it works, from the performances to the writing, the execution, and especially the Sherman Brothers’ astounding score of instantly hummable songs.

So when director Rob Marshall (“Chicago,” “Into the Woods,” “Nine”) took on this sequel, he had a lot to live up to.

Mostly he succeeds. There are a few flat sequences and the new Music Hall-steeped score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, while perfectly serviceable and occasionally inspired (the moving “The Place Where Lost Things Go, for example), is never as catchy as the original.

But Emily Blunt makes for a slyly entertaining Mary, “Hamilton” star and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda makes a solid film debut, and several of the musical numbers  are showstoppers.  A delectable sense of childlike wonder prevails.

The plot cooked up by David Magee, John DeLuca and Marshall draws heavily from P.L. Travers’ nine “Poppins” books, and in many instances offers a sort of variation on high points from the ’65 film.

The setting has been advanced from pre World War I London to the Depression era.  Michael and Jane Banks, the kids from the original, are now adults (played by Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer).  Michael, the widowed father of three, still works at the bank where his father was employed; Jane, taking a cue from her suffragette mother, is a labor organizer.

Michael, who is hopeless with money, is about to lose the family home to foreclosure by his own employer (represented by two-faced exec  Colin Firth).  The family’s only hope is to find a small fortune in bank shares purchased decades earlier — but the papers have all gone missing.

Into this tense situation who should appear but Mary Poppins (Blunt), who in her own no-nonsense way organizes and entertains  the incredibly adorable kids (Pixie Davies,  Nathanael Saleh and Joel Dawson) with a series of fantastic adventures.

Our narrator through all this is a lamplighter, Jack (Miranda), who serves precisely the same function as did Dick Van Dyke’s chimneysweep Bert in the original. Introduced with the song “Lovely London Sky,” Jack is featured in “Trip a Little Light Fantastic”  featuring a host of dancing lamplighters that mirrors the “Step in Time ” extravaganza from 1965.

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“THE POST”: Do the right thing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Tom Hanks

“THE POST” My rating: B+ 

115 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Steven Spielberg’s powers as a storyteller are so secure that not even the miscasting of one of “The Post’s” two leads can do much damage to the narrative.

This sprawling effort — it begins with a firefight in Vietnam and winds down with a firestorm over the Second Amendment — hits the ground running and rarely slows down for a breath. It’s like a Spielberg master class in taking a complicated story and telling it cleanly and efficiently.

And like other major movies about real-world journalism — “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight” especially — “The Post” could hardly be more timely.  With a president who shows every indication that he’d love to roll back freedom of the press, this film is so relevant it hurts.

The subject, of course, is the 1971 scandal over the Pentagon Papers.  That massive study, commissioned by LBJ’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, looked at American involvement in Vietnam going back to the Truman administration. It revealed that the experts had always known a land war in Vietnam was unwinnable — but had plowed ahead anyway, sacrificing billions of dollars and countless lives on what amounted to political face-saving.

The papers showed that the Johnson administration had systematically lied to the public and to Congress so as to continue the war.

McNamara suppressed the study; the public only learned of its existence when one of its authors, Rand Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), made an illegal copy of the top secret document and passed it on to The New York Times.

Today  The Washington Post sits at or near the top of American newspapers (thanks to its reporting on the Watergate Scandal in 1972-’73).  But in 1971 The Post was at best a regional paper…and not a very good one.

Its new editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), was pushing it toward greatness, but still felt himself outclassed by the journalistic aces at The Times. He was particularly concerned about rumors that The Times was about to scoop The Post (and every other news outlet) with a major story.

That big story was the Pentagon Papers. No sooner had the first in a series of articles been published than a federal judge — at the behest of the Nixon administration — enjoined The Times from printing additional material.

Bradley’s Post, however, was under no gag order. Working back channels Bradley got his hands on another copy of the papers and prepared to publish even more revelations on the pages of The Post.

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“FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS”: The voice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 11, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant

Simon Helberg, Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant

“FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS”   My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Aug. 12)

 110 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

The human capacity for self-delusion has long been fodder for dramatists. Usually it’s the stuff of satire or tragedy.

“Florence Foster Jenkins,” though, has it both ways.

Written by Nicholas Martin (his first feature after a long career in Brit TV), directed by Stephen Frears (“Dangerous Liaisons,” “Philomena,” “The Queen” ) and starring Meryl Streep in a prime slice of Oscar bait, this real-life yarn encourages us to laugh uproariously at the human foibles on display but sends us away in a somber mood.

It’s the rare film that discovers dignity in foolishness.

The title character was a real person, a New York heiress (1868-1944) who became famous — or infamous — for her out-of-tune renditions of operatic arias.

Frears’ film unfolds in the last year of Jenkins’ life. Our guide to Florence’s oddball world is Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg), a scrawny, struggling pianist who as the film begins is hired as Florence’s accompanist and discovers to his horror that he’s backing one of the century’s worst voices.

What’s more, he’s now immersed in Florence’s bizarre household.

Streep’s Florence has more money than good sense. A lover of classical music, she has devoted much of her fortune to private recitals at which she is the main attraction.

A zaftig dowager (Streep wears a convincing fat suit) with alarming taste in fashion and the stage presence of an eager child, Florence honestly believes that she has a great voice.

This delusion is encouraged by the blue-haired biddies who are her devoted fans and by her common-law husband and manager, St. Clair Bayfield (an excellent Hugh Grant).

Bayfield is a failed Shakespearean actor — one of those hammy thesps whose delivery is all about the words but rarely about their meaning — who for three decades has been sponging off the Jenkins fortune.

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“SUFFRAGETTE”: Bad old days

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 12, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan

Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan

“SUFFRAGETTE” My rating: B

106 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

A sad lesson of history is that power is rarely shared without a fight.

In “Suffragette” the terrific Carey Mulligan plays a London woman who goes from placid wife, mother and laundress to bomb-tossing terrorist. Her goal: voting rights for women.

Set almost exactly 100 years ago, “Suffragette” takes place at a time when the suffrage movement had hit a wall.  For decades British women had been peaceably seeking equality with their menfolk. They had petitioned their representatives. They’d demonstrated in an orderly fashion. And it had gotten them nowhere.

(The movie’s opening moments are filled with the voices of men pontificating on why women are too emotional and intellectually underachieving to be given a place at the political table. A woman, we’re told, should be happy to have her interests seen to by her husband, father, or brothers.)

In the character of Maud Watts (Mulligan), Abi Morgan’s screenplay gives us a lens through which we experience much of women’s struggle for equality.

As the picture starts Maud is living in more-or-less happy fashion with her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and their son George (Adam Michael Dodd, who has a crying scene to match Jackie Coogan’s in Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid”). Both adults work at the same laundry, a place of sweat and billowing steam where the owner sexually preys on the younger girls. They are not-quite impoverished but fairly content.

Maud is first exposed to the women’s movement when she witnesses a cadre of suffragettes heaving stones through store windows while chanting “Votes for women!” A co-worker (Anne-Marie Duff) begins talking up the movement and its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in what amounts to a cameo role). At the last minute a reluctant Maud is recruited to describe conditions at the laundry before a parliamentary committee. She hopes for the best.

The best doesn’t happen. Peaceful rallies are broken up by club-wielding coppers. Mrs. Pankhurst goes underground, emerging publicly just long enough to make a stinging attack upon the authorities before vanishing once again.

Maud finds herself quickly becoming radicalized. She plots with other women at a pharmacy run by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), whose knowledge of chemistry makes her an ideal bomb maker. Soon Maud is dropping sputtering explosive packages into public mailboxes and cutting telephone lines.

Meanwhile Maud’s activities and subsequent stays in jail — which include a hunger strike and forced feedings — alienate Sonny, who prevents her from seeing her son. (And, as it turns out, does much worse than that.)

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“INTO THE WOODS”: Like a fairy tale, until…

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 24, 2014| 1 Comment »

James Cordern, Emily Blunt and Meryl Streep

James Corden, Emily Blunt and Meryl Streep

 

“INTO THE WOODS”  My rating: B-

124 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

“Into the Woods” is a terrific big-screen musical right up to the point when it suddenly stops being great and turns disheartening and annoying.

In this it is exactly like the stage version of this Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine collaboration, which I saw in previews in New York just before its 1987 debut.  I’m talking 90 minutes of wonderful followed by 30 minutes of meh. So meh, in fact, that it damn near ruins all the good stuff.

Director Rob Marshall, who more or less singlehandedly resurrected the movie musical with 2002’s “Chicago,” comes charging out of the gate here, delivering a movie that works musically and  cinematically and which strikes just the right tongue-in-cheek tone in revisiting the fairy tale cliches of our childhoods.

In a village just outside the woods the Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) yearn for a child.  Their cronish neighbor (a gleefully scenery-chawing Meryl Streep), widely believed to be a witch, reveals that in his childhood she put a curse of infertility on the Baker.  Now she offers to lift the hex if the couple will obtain for her several items needed for an incantation that will restore her youth and beauty.

Among the things sought in this scavenger hunt: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold.

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“AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY”: At-your-throat acting

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2014| 3 Comments »

Julianne Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts

Julianne Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts

“AUGUST:  OSAGE COUNTY”  My rating: C+ (Opens wide on Jan. 10)

121 minutes | MPAA rating R

Some stories were meant to be performed on a stage.

For instance, the plays of Sam Shepard, which deliver moments of violence and affrontery you almost never see in live theater. A Shepard character might be required to beat a typewriter to death with a golf club, smash dozens of glass bottles just feet from the folks in the front row, or urinate on his little sister’s science project in full view of the paying customers.

If those things happened in a movie, you’d shrug. No big deal.  In a movie you can do anything.

But seeing those moments play out live, in the flesh, while you brace yourself to dodge flying glass shards or broken typewriter keys…well, that has a way of focusing your mind most wonderfully.

I thought of Shepard’s plays while watching John Wells’ screen version of “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-winning black comedy about an Oklahoma clan assembled to bury its patriarch (played, ironically enough, by  Sam Shepard).  In the same way that Shepard’s  plays almost never make satisfying movies, “August: Osage County” makes an uncomfortable transition to the screen.

First, don’t buy into the TV ads that make it look like a rollicking comedy.  There are laughs here, yeah, but they’re the sort of laughs you can choke on. Dourness is the order of the day.

In adapting his play Letts has boiled a 3 1/2 hour production down to 2 hours. Stuff’s been left out — character development, carefully calibrated pauses — and while the essence of the play remains, it feels curiously underwhelming.

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“THE IRON LADY”: Her coolness

Posted in Art house fare, tagged , on January 13, 2012| 1 Comment »

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher

“The IRON LADY” My rating: B-  (Opening Jan. 13 at the ** theaters)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

By now we should be thoroughly inured to Meryl Streep’s transformational abilities.

Even so, her performance as Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady” comes as a shock.

Yes, she gets immeasurable help from an unsung crew of costumers, hairdressers and makeup artists. But as with any Streep performance, the magic goes far deeper than the surface. The way in which Streep’s Maggie Thatcher moves, holds herself, speaks — it is little short of eerie.

Streep’s believability in the role goes a long way toward ameliorating the movie’s biggest drawback — namely that director Phyllida Law (“Mamma Mia!”) and screenwriter  Abi Morgan (“Brick Lane,” “Shame”) are deeply ambivalent about their subject.

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