Movies

Les Miserables: Now I’m miserable, too

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Let’s get this out of the way first – having neither seen nor desired to see the Broadway musical Les Miserables, I am not the target audience for this movie.  I don’t care for melodramas – and Les Mis is two melodramas in one – the story of the saintly Jean Valjean being chased for decades by the monomaniacal Javert and a romance between two kids.  So I was mostly bored.  If, however, you love Les Mis, you’ll probably enjoy this long, long, lavish all-star effort from director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, The Damned United, John Adams).

The cast is mostly excellent.  Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn), Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit are all excellent singers and give outstanding performances.  Redmayne is exceptional.  Sasha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are very funny in the comic roles (the highlight of the movie for lowbrow me). The other lead is Russell Crowe, who really can’t match the singing ability of the other actors, which is a distraction.

Hooper has made the costumes and make-up very realistic for the filthy and scabby period.  This, for me, was jarring when juxtaposed against the artificiality of the characters breaking into song and some very cheesy CGI sets.

Now here’s one of my pet peeves – movies that should be over but linger like an unwanted guest.  Here, both of the plot threads (the chase and the romance) are resolved, yet the movie goes on for three more songs, including a death scene and the stirring finale.  Aaaack.

Save the Date: nothing new here

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Save the Date is an utterly unremarkable romantic comedy – and has nothing in common with the smart rom coms that I’m writing about today.  A young woman is barely ready to commit to moving in with her smitten boyfriend when he poisons the romance with an unwelcome public marriage proposal.  Then she meets her soul mate.  There is no reason for her to stay with the boyfriend or to spurn the new guy, hence there is no credible conflict in the story.

It is a waste of its star, Lizzy Caplan, who is quite good in a broader comedy 3,2,1…Frankie Go Boom from earlier this year. If you must see a romantic comedy this weekend, rent Ruby Sparks or The Five-Year Engagement.

King Kelly: a rip-roaring satire

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In the refreshing satire King Kelly, a girl strips for her webcam and aspires to become a sex website mogul.  Her monomaniacal brattiness leads to a series of bad decisions that drive her to leave her parents’ suburban Long Island  home for a madcap series of adventures, which are all recorded on a cell phone.

That the entire movie is shot on a cell phone is more than a novelty here – it enhances the urgency and chaos of the rip-roaring escapades as well as satirizing our current post-it-on-Facebook-while-it’s-happening culture.

The nuclear core of King Kelly is the main character of Kelly, brought alive in a full throttle performance by Louisa Krause.  Besides taking teen self absorption and selfishness to an unsurpassed level, Kelly combines it with astonishingly misplaced moral superiority and entitlement.  [And how do kids get to be so entitled these days?  Are there concierge suites in kindergarten where a child doesn’t need to wait her turn?]   King Kelly‘s genius is that the Kelly’s brattiness is not just unappealing, but so over-the-top as to be very, very funny.

King Kelly also satirizes our reality TV world where people are no longer capable of being embarrassed by any behavior on their part.

It’s original, funny and moves fast.   I saw King Kelly on YouTube VOD.

Hyde Park on Hudson: FDR was never so boring

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FDR was our first charismatic celebrity President in the era of radio and newsreels, a man who dominated his tumultuous times and who lived among a fascinating collection of characters.  It’s hard to imagine his life as boring, but it sure is in Hyde Park on Hudson.  Bill Murray is FDR and Lara Linney is his distant cousin and one of his mistresses.  It’s set mostly during the weekend that FDR entertained the King and Queen of England at his country home.  The problem is that the woman that Linney plays was a no-drama wallflower, and that the royal visit, while interesting, was a footnote to the history of the era.  The source material for Hyde Park on Hudson would have made a mildly entertaining one-hour segment on Masterpiece Theater – it’s not worth a visit to the theater.

The Impossible: if you enjoy watching kids in peril

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In The Impossible, a family goes on a beach holiday in Thailand where a tsunami strikes and separates the parents (Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor) from each other.  Rescue operations after a massive natural disaster in a third word country are predictably chaotic.  The story is about each of the parents finding their kids, losing them, finding them again and looking for the other parent.  It is based on a true story.

If you enjoy watching human suffering, especially with children in peril (think Trauma:Life in the E.R.) and heartwarming reunifications, you may enjoy this movie.  That’s really all there is here.  It’s competently acted, but it’s just a standard kids-in-danger disaster movie.  The tsunami scenes are very good, but I did not find them as compelling as Clint Eastwood’s in Hereafter.

Oddly, Naomi Watts has garnered Best Actress nominations from the Screen Actors Guild and the Golden Globes for this picture.  These seem more reflective of her fine body of work (Mulholland Dr., 21 Grams, Fair Game) than of her performance here, where she does a good job essentially playing a pinata.

I was very disappointed in The Impossible because director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez had combined for 2007’s The Orphanage, one of the best ghost movies I’ve ever seen.  But, The Impossible is at its core disaster movie, and it fails to rise above its genre.

Deadfall: Two killers, one shotgun and Thanksgiving dinner

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Deadfall is a solid thriller that is flying under the radar this holiday season.  Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are brother and sister running for the Canadian border after a casino heist.  They wreck their car and split up.  The brother sets off overland, leaving a trail of murderous carnage.   The local cops are on the alert, including the sheriff’s deputy daughter (Kate Mara).   Meanwhile,  a bad luck boxer (Charlie Hannum of Sons of Anarchy) is released from prison, impulsively commits another crime and is headed for his parents’ (Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson) remote northern cabin.  The sister hitches a ride with the boxer.  Everybody converges at the boxer’s parents’ place for an extremely stressful Thanksgiving dinner.

An essential element of this thriller is that all of the families are dysfunctional.   The siblings have survived a hellish upbringing, from which the older brother has rescued his little sister; unfortunately, he has emerged as a psychopath himself and has infantilized the sister.  The relationship between the boxer and his father has been poisoned by a long-festering dispute.  The sheriff resents and belittles his bright and highly professional daughter while doting on her idiot brothers.

The core of the movie is the evolving relationship between Wilde’s sister and Hunnam’s boxer.  Neither knows that the other is on the lam.  She cynically seduces him because he is useful.  But then she starts to fall for him, and, by Thanksgiving dinner, her loyalties are uncertain.

Sissy Spacek is brilliant as the boxer’s mom, who must steer over the wreckage of the relationship between her son and her husband, and who must then serve a Thanksgiving dinner to a volatile killer who is holding a shotgun on the other guests.  She is a great actor, and she’s as good here as in any of her signature performances.

The cinematography, characters, acting and the directorial choices by Stefan Ruzowitzky are excellent.  What keeps Deadfall from being one of the year’s best is some trite, TV movie level dialogue along the way.  Still, it’s a good watch.

Note: This is NOT the 1993 Deadfall, with Nicholas Cage even more over-the-top than usual.

The Matchmaker: a character-driven gem from Israel

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Fascinating characters make good stories and good movies, and the Israeli gem The Matchmaker has them aplenty.   A middle class teenager falls into a very unusual summer job – the “spy guy” for a matchmaker based in a Haifa neighborhood where prostitutes and smugglers ply their trades.  His job is to shadow prospective brides and grooms to verify their suitability for a match.  The kid is a pretty normal teen with an affection for detective fiction and an emerging talent for writing, and we see the other characters through his prism.

The Matchmaker is set in 1968, when many Israeli adults were Holocaust survivors who refused to talk about the Holocaust.  Ironically, the adult conspiracy of silence means that the teen characters know less about the Holocaust than do other kids around the world.  Almost all the adult characters are emotionally scarred in ways the kids really can’t understand.

The matchmaker himself is a shambling, secretive and somewhat shady guy, with unexplained facial scars.  He is an uncanny, but not always perfect, judge of human foibles.  He advises his clients, “I find you what you need, not what you want”.  It turns out that matchmaking is his passion, but he makes his living from another, less legal business.

The matchmaker himself pines for a charming but extremely emotionally fragile woman who works with him.  There’s also a kind, beautiful and lovelorn woman who owns a theater and is a dwarf.  We also have an obsessive librarian who is even more tightly wound than we see at first.  Oh, and the kid’s best friend’s American cousin comes for a visit, and she’s smokin’ hot.

So The Matchmaker is a coming of age movie, but one unlike any you have seen because of the singular characters.  Credit goes to Director Avi Lesher, who adapted the screenplay from a novel by Amir Gutfreund.

Starlet: an odd couple with a surprising bond

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In the indie relationship drama Starlet, a 21-year-old woman is living in a seedy part of the San Fernando Valley and working in an even sketchier industry, when she buys an old thermos from a woman sixty years older than she.  She finds a considerable sum of cash hidden within the thermos, keeps it, and, out of guilt, insinuates herself into the old woman’s life.  The octogenarian is initially resistant, but a bond grows between them; each has a need that is revealed during the movie.  It’s worth sitting back and going with the leisurely story, because the payoff at the end is surprisingly moving.

Model Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of Ernest) demonstrates an engaging screen presence as the young woman.  In her first movie credit, Besedka Johnson is astonishingly good as the older woman, both formidable and vulnerable.  Stella Maeve is very convincing as the young woman’s nogoodnik roommate.

In the Family: debut of a brilliant director

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6-year-old Chip has two daddies, Cody and Joey.  When his biological father Cody is killed in an auto accident, Cody’s sister takes custody of Chip, and Joey fights to get his son back.  Writer-director Patrick Wang stars as Joey, and what makes In the Family more than just another social issue picture is Wang’s authenticity as a writer and brilliance as a director.

Wang uses long scenes shot by a static camera and an almost silent soundtrack to draw in the audience.   We watch Joey being told of Cody’s death through a hospital window and we only hear the passing truck traffic.  We see the kitchen when Joey and Chip come home after the funeral – Joey sits stunned, fingering the mail, and Chip, yearning for some normalcy, sets up beverages.  The film climaxes with Joey’s testimony at a deposition, mostly shot from the end of a conference table.  These are some of the most compelling scenes that I’ve seen this year.

The problem with In the Family is that it is 2 hours and 47 minutes long.  There are long films that need to be long (e.g., Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), but this isn’t one of them.  There’s probably a 130 minute indie hit somewhere inside In the Family.

It’s clear that Patrick Wang is a fine actor and an unusually talented writer-director (who needs to find an equally talented editor).  I’m certainly looking forward to his next work.

Lay the Favorite: purported to be a comedy

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What a disappointment.  Lay the Favorite, opening this weekend, sports a fine director, Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity, The Snapper), and a promising cast (Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Carroll Lynch).  But the story fails, and it’s just not funny.

Willis plays a Vegas sports gambler who apprentices a naive young thing (Hall).  They face the ups and downs of sports betting, his embittered wife, a welching better (Lynch) and a sleazeball bookie (Vince Vaughan).  Nothing in the story rings true.  Rebecca Hall, so good as the classy smart girl in Vicky Christina Barcelona, plays Florida trailer trash – even wearing Daisy Dukes throughout the whole movie – and it just doesn’t work.  Worse, Vince Vaughan takes his usual wild man to an even more manic level, which falls flat.

Skip it.