Tag: movies

MOVIE REVIEW: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Through the sheer strength of the performances of the actors in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I found myself still carrying about the fate of their characters.

Second_Best_posterIf you did not see the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which I enjoyed, you will be, I suspect, hopelessly lost watching the sequel, the aptly titled The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. You won’t understand most of the characters’ relationships or motivations.

Even before The Wife and I saw the film at The Spectrum Theatre, my friend Steve Bissette had written this parallel to, of all things, the Andy Griffith Show:

“For me, SECOND BEST’s Dev Patel [as Sonny] was thanklessly trapped in the 21st-century faux-Bollywood Don Knotts role. Like, if India was Mayberry, and Barney Fife was of course going to mistake the wrong person as “important” and treat the right person like dung, making us all squirm in embarrassment to the end. Only if, like, Barney ran a hotel with Maggie Smith, could dance really, really well, and had a really hot fianceé [Tina Desai as Sunaina].”

That would make the gruff character played by Maggie Smith the sheriff. The movie threw away her best line, possibly the best one in the film: “I went with low expectations and came back disappointed,” referring to the United States.

Steve’s framing was quite helpful, actually, in allowing the Sonny character from driving me crazy. Near the end of the film, not much of a spoiler, Sonny promises to be a better husband than he was a fiance.

This is NOT a great film, and I wouldn’t quite recommend it. Yet, through the sheer strength of the performances of the returning actors Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, and others, plus the newbies, such as Richard Gere, I found myself still carrying about the fate of their characters. They were old friends you catch up with at the reunion. And I like the second half of the film more than the first.

If you loved the first movie, tamp down your expectations of the second, and you might like it just fine.

MOVIE REVIEW: Still Alice

“The film Still Alice doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact.”

stillaliceThe Wife and I saw the movie Still Alice the Saturday after Julianne Moore won the Best Actress Oscar.

I didn’t see the other nominees in the category, save for Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, but she was fine. Great, actually, as linguistics professor Alice Howland, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Alec Baldwin plays her husband John, somewhat self-absorbed with his own academic career; Baldwin’s played this type of character before.

Kate Bosworth is the annoying married daughter Anna. The guys playing her brother and her husband were mostly ciphers because they didn’t have that much to do.

The key family relationship is between Alice and her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress named Lydia (good name, that), played by Kirsten Stewart. I had NEVER seen her in any movie. The Twilight series actress was surprisingly not bad, though, as a friend of mine who happened to attend the same showing, she has a tendency to mumble.

Weeks later, I’m still trying to figure out why this movie, based on a book I have not read, felt a bit distant to me. I’m not sure, but here are some observations:

*There’s a scene that is out of focus, save for Alice. I KNOW it was showing her feeling disorientated, but it LOOKED as though perhaps she was going blind, and that was a distraction.

*Perhaps the emotional center was a speech, which came more or less in the middle of the movie, a time I actually teared up.

*The bathroom scene at the summer house was the most painful.

*The scene involving the video of Alice’s younger self almost played as a very dark comedy.

*The family, save for Lydia, seemed so shiny and put together.

This Spectator review says it better than I:

“The film doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact. Still Alice thus joins a growing band of movies… which seem plucked into existence solely to fatten up a single performance for awards season, while everyone else — the rest of the cast, director, crew — goes on a starvation diet. The people around Alice are sketches.”

My mother had some sort of dementia in the months before she died, and of course, the disease manifests itself in many different ways. She was far older than Alice, not as well educated, not as self-aware. All of that probably colors the movie for me as well.

F is for 10 films that have influenced me

I was reading this Facebook chat with someone I knew and his friend, who suggested that the world was black and white until the early 1960s.

beingthereThere’s some online game in which you name ten films that heavily influenced your way of thinking, or world view, or whatever. They need not be GOOD films or your FAVORITE films. If I picked Annie Hall, which may be my favorite, it would be selected, as I noted before, because of my hatred of going into a movie after it starts, just like Alvy Singer (Woody Allen). But let me look elsewhere.

Being There (1979) – Can a guy uttering stuff he’s heard on TV be embraced as a wise and profound leader? Seemed ridiculous at the time, save for televangelists, but now reality-show “celebrities” often drive the national dialogue (see: Jersey Shore, Duck Dynasty, The Real Housewives of Topeka, et al.)

Field of Dreams (1989) – While I LOVE the baseball talk, especially as espoused by the James Earl Jones character, for me, the key is the relationship between Ray (Kevin Costner) and his late father, which ALWAYS gets to me.

King of Hearts/Le roi de coeur (1966) – Blurs the line between who is sane and who is not.

Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2000)- After apartheid fell in South Africa, there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission designed, not to punish, but to have people own up to the abuses that took place. (A similar action took place in Rwanda, to great effect.) If only the United States had had something similar after the Civil War, instead of a brief Reconstruction, followed by years of Jim Crow segregation.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) – one can find friendship in the most unlikely places. Plus a pedestrian should assert his right to cross the street.

Pleasantville (1998) – I was reading this Facebook chat with someone I knew and his friend; the latter suggested that the world was black and white until the early 1960s. I suspect that perception comes from photographs and television largely being in b&w until then. The conceit of this movie is that once someone becomes really engaged in life, they turn from b&w to color. (Notice in this Pentatonix video, Evolution of Music, it segues from b&w to color in the early 1960s.)

The Truman Show (1998) – To his surprise, a guy’s whole life is actually a television show. Now, it seems, there’s no end of people who are willing to be on television, spilling intimate details, in exchange for counseling, money, fame. There’s even drama in going on those home rehab shows on HGTV. EVERYBODY is a star, for the requisite 15 minutes, it appears.

War Games (1983) – I didn’t think at the time that someone playing video games could almost start World War III. Since then, I’m less convinced of my initial convictions.

West Side Story (1961) – The movie looks a little dated, last I watched it, yet the music is timeless.

Woodstock (1970) – Music groups I was introduced to, such as Santana, plus groups I saw in a different light, such as Sly & the Family Stone. Someone on Facebook wrote last month, “The New York State Thruway is closed, man,” and right away there was a whole dialogue about brown acid and kosher bacon.
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5 Famous Movies That Shamelessly Ripped Off Obscure Ones.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Truth in movies

I’m not looking for documentaries in my biopics.

American-Sniper-2014If you’re a big movie fan, you’ve noticed the wealth of movies that based on real-life events, including Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Unbroken, and Wild.

Someone named Penelope Puddlisms wrote: “I read your interesting review about the Selma movie and the issue about its accuracy. It makes me wonder why anyone would risk fudging even a small bit of the facts when every other aspect tries so painfully hard to be carefully spot on and provide a documentary feel. This happens in lots of similar movies.”

That is a reasonable question. One could ask “why” of the novelist who fictionalizes real events. A lot of the real things that happen are not very dramatic. Movies often combine characters, and tighten time frames, because the absolute, unedited factual events are often BORING.

Of course, the further from the present one is, or events that took place in remote locations, not documented by camera. Inevitably, one has to extrapolate dialogue, at least.

Beyond that, and I’m neither a novelist nor a filmmaker, I suppose, it is to make a greater point about the situation.

For example, in American Sniper, a movie I have not seen, Chris Hedges writes:

Enter The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see a child’s arm he amputated. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die with them.”

I surmise, and I’m just spitballing here, that by making the bad guy more villainous, it makes the killing of “savage, despicable evil” more justifiable, even palatable.

The Imitation Game, which I liked quite a bit, nevertheless took great liberties with many characters, as you can read in Slate. For instance:

[Christopher] Hodges [author of the book Alan Turing: The Enigma] paints Turing as shy, eccentric, and impatient with irrationality, but Cumberbatch’s narcissistic, detached Alan has more in common with the actor’s title character in Sherlock than with the Turing of Hodges’ biography. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as “a very easily approachable man” and said “we were very very fond of him”; none of this is reflected in the film.

Why the character alteration? Perhaps because it made a more interesting story, more of a contrast with some of the other participants.

Time magazine analyzed Big Eyes, another film I appreciated. While some parts were deemed as true:

In the film, next to nobody is allowed in the Keane house for fear that they will discover Margaret’s studio and therefore the Keane secret. Though it is true that nobody—including Margaret’s daughter and their staff—was allowed in Margaret’s studio, Walter Keane would invite socialites and celebrities to their home.

I surmise that the fiction made her seem even more isolated, since “Margaret rarely met these celebs since she was painting 16 hours per day. Even when Walter left the house, he would call Margaret every hour to ensure that she hadn’t left.”

Entertainment Weekly fact-checked Theory of Everything. Stephen Hawking deemed the movie about his life with his ex-wife, “broadly true.” I liked it, but maybe if it were less true to its source, it might have been a more exciting film.

I’m not looking for documentaries in my biopics. It may be useful to check to see how much the story varies from the facts, but I certainly never felt the need to do so before seeing any film, only after the fact.

MOVIE (on TV) REVIEW: Life Itself

The Siskel & Ebert legendary fights I had read about, and heard about, yet seeing the apparent disdain they had for one another in clips was astonishing.

life_itself-Roger-EbertI had watched Roger Ebert review movies for decades, then saw him on Oprah with his talking device after he lost his ability to speak. I’ve read many of his blog essays, including those about non-cinematic issues.

So what could I learn about him from watching the documentary Life Itself, based on Ebert’s autobiography, which I loved greatly? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

CNN, of all networks, shows documentary movies, I’ve discovered. I recorded Life Itself, then watched it in one sitting, zapping through the half dozen commercial breaks.

Roger Ebert got the film critic job at the Chicago Sun-Times only because the position had become vacant. But he LOVED the movies. As the book begins: “I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.”

In both the book and movie, Ebert described the drinking he did, to be one of the Newspaper Guys. Nevertheless, it was surprising to hear his colleagues report on Ebert’s escapades before he went sober in 1979. Roger met Chaz, his wife of the last 20 years of his life, at an AA meeting, which had not been previously revealed.

Roger wrote about Chaz and his relatively late-in-life romance, and how important her children and grandchildren were to him. Still, it was wonderful actually see the love Roger clearly had for Chaz’s family, and vice versa.

The Siskel & Ebert legendary fights I had read about, and heard about, yet seeing the apparent disdain they had for one another in clips was astonishing. It was an odd sibling rivalry for Ebert, who, as an only child, was used to getting his way. He was irritated that Siskel, by virtue of a coin flip, got top billing over the Pulitzer prize-winning, older, alphabetically first Ebert. Still, Gene’s widow Marlene believed that, by the end of Gene’s life, the critics loved each other.

An unexpected revelation for me was that it was Siskel who got to hang out with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Clubs. Roger Ebert’s interest in “well-endowed” women was well-known, as he co-wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Roger’s life became much more an open book, especially after Siskel’s death; Ebert did not know that Siskel was dying of brain cancer. That freeing philosophy allowed him to appear on the cover of Esquire magazine, which was, at first, a shocking physical appearance before it became the new normal.

Not surprising was Roger Ebert’s support of new filmmakers, from Martin Scorcese (co-executive producer of this film) and Errol Morris to, more recently, Ramin Bahrani and Ava DuVernay, the latter now the director of the movie Selma, who was touched early by Ebert’s reviews. Watch the clip showing a photo of a young Ava with Ebert.

The film Life Itself was directed by Steve James, whose great documentary Hoop Dreams Roger Ebert had also championed. “James directed [the Ebert] documentary without realizing at the beginning that it would chronicle Ebert’s moving last days.”

I might have gotten a little misty-eyed a couple of times.

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