Tag: review

Movie review: The Dial of Destiny

Indiana Jones 5

My wife and I caught a midweek matinee of the movie Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the Madison Theatre in Albany in mid-July. It was…only OK.

I saw the Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1981, which I liked quite a bit. Then I saw the third film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), which I loved, not only for the comedic riffs between Indy and his dad (Sean Connery) but also taking a leap of faith. But I’ve never seen film two (Temple of Doom) or four (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

The new movie starts back in World War II, as Indy and his colleague Basil Shaw are trying to keep a device that can change the course of history out of Nazi hands. But Harrison Ford looks oddly young, or young oddly. It’s the use of AI, which broadly worked, but I found it a tad creepy.

Fast forward to 1969, with Indy as a majorly ineffective professor. But he’s retiring. A young woman joins him afterward, who turns out to be his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), with a hidden agenda.

Exhausting

Lots of breathless chases on three continents ensue. The good part is that these were generally technically fine. The not-so-good part was that, in toto, they went on too long without enough of a point. As one reviewer noted, director James “Mangold can’t find the visual gags in the setups. There’s no joy in the chase.”  

One of the villains was a black woman named Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson) with a classic ‘fro who was presumably in charge of the thugs.  The point of this character was lost on me. 

Conversely, I liked Teddy (Ethann Isidore), Helena’s very young associate. The hubris of time travel and the pseudoscience involved worked for me.  Indy complaining about Father Time was believable. I And the ending, I loved.  

Still, it felt as though the movie was coasting on nostalgia. A positive review notes that the film “lacks the effervescent spark that made the series so special.”

I’m not sorry I went, but I certainly wouldn’t want to see it again.

Movie review: Past Lives

Written and directed by Celine Song

The movie Past Lives is about Nora and Hae Sung, two close childhood friends in South Korea. When Nora’s family emigrates to North America, Nora (Greta Lee) pursues her dreams of being a writer. She eventually marries Arthur Zaturansky (John Magaro), an American.

Hae Sung  (Teo Yoo) comes to New York City, where Nora and Arthur live. Nora and Hae Sung see each other in person for the first time in two decades. Conversation ensues, as the IMDb description puts it, “They confront notions of love and destiny.”

My wife and I liked this movie we saw at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany a LOT.

Before we saw it, James Preller, an author of my acquaintance, wrote: “A beautiful, slow-moving, subtle film that has lingered with me. About life, and loss, and choices, and ambition — and, at its heart, an immigration story. A love story. Three main characters and they are all treated with compassion and respect. This will easily be one of my best films of the year. Saw it in a near-empty theater. Written and directed by a Canadian woman, Celine Song.”

A thumbs-down?

As is often the case when I like a movie, I look at the negative reviews. There were four among the 175 critics listed on Rotten Tomatoes. The one that stood out for me was by Alison Willmore from New York magazine in an article entitled Past Lives Is Tasteful, Understated, and Unconvincing.

” There’s a disconcerting shrewdness underneath its patina of tastefulness — it’s too calculating to achieve the transcendent almost-romance it strives for but never inhabits.”

It is tasteful (whatever that means.) It’s understated, maybe a little slow, which was fine by me. Someone else suggested cutting 15 minutes from its 1:43 running time, but I’m not feeling it.

As for “unconvincing,” I’m in the opposite camp. It rang true for my wife and me. And we never moved over 11,000 km (over 6800 miles) from home to a place with a different language and culture.

Movie review: You Hurt My Feelings

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener

First off, You Hurt My Feelings is a terrible title for just about any movie. In fact, it’s so lame that I managed to forget it between the time I saw it at a Wednesday matinee  at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany and a meeting I had that evening. Someone chided that the film itself must not be very memorable as I looked it up on my phone.

“You Hurt My Feelings, ” I said. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” they replied. “No, that’s the name of the movie,” I noted.

Beth  (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (Tobias Menzies) are practically joined at the hip. They share the same ice cream cone! The couple reminded me of RichAndAmy, characters in the comic strip Zits, “a couple that have gradually morphed into a single organism.” This, BTW, is cringeworthy to me.

Then Beth, a writer, and her sister/best friend Sarah (Michaela Watkins) overhear a conversation that therapist Don and Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed) are having.

This leads to a fundamental question about what “telling the truth” means when someone seeks your opinion. It’s a “film about trust, lies, and the things we say to the people we love most.” These characters – Beth, Don, interior designer Sarah, and actor Mark  – are all having some doubts about their chosen profession. Beth and Don’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) is likewise stymied by his parents’ expectations about the book he has yet to finish..

Response

I’m interested in the disparity between the critics’ reaction (95% postive on Rotten Tomatoes) and the audience response (64% positive). In the former category was Max Weiss in Baltimore Magazine, who says “It’s wonderful to watch these great actors living out this minor (to us), but major (to them) crisis.” I will suggest that the sense that they all feel a sense of imposter syndrome makes their anxiety very relatable.

The audience summary notes that You Hurt My Feelings “is well-acted and sometimes funny, but it’s also slow — and it can be hard to care about the problems of some fairly unlikable characters.” It’s not uproariously humorous but its comedy is in the recognition that we know people like them. Or maybe we ARE people like them. I didn’t find them particularly unlikable once Beth and Don stopped sharing dessert.

Indeed, my wife and I talked about the basic premise for days afterward. Writer/director Nicole Holofcener has asked the question about whether we are obliged to be candid or be positive,  and smartly doesn’t entirelty provide an answer.

Review: Across the Spider-Verse

Miles Morales

There have been recent Marvel movies that I’ve thought about viewing (Guardians 3, e.g.) and I still may. When Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse came out, though, I HAD to see it. The fact that that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a pretty good gauge of popular culture on his Substack, loved it only added to my anticipation.

Spider-Man is my favorite character in the Marvel universe. During COVID, I saw all of the iterations of all of the Spidey films I had missed, which made No Way Home so delicious.

Still, my favorite webslinger film was the animated Into the Spider-Verse featuring Miles Morales. Across is a follow-up to that.

Isn’t it? The lengthy beginning of the film, before the credits, made me wonder for a time. Oh, yeah, there’s our young hero saving his neighborhood and frustrating his parents with… whatever secret he’s obviously keeping.

Gwen Stacy, a Spidey from a different sphere, shows up. This eventually prompts the Brooklyn-based teen to cross the Multiverse to join forces with other Spider-People to take on a calamitous villain Miles thinks he may be responsible for.

Without giving anything away, the film leans into the overarching mythos of the webslingers.

Obamaesque?

I was fascinated by the New Yorker article The Post-Racial Vision of “Across the Spider-Verse.” The subhead: “The movie treats its fantastical multiethnic team of superheroes and their forays into cultural determinism with Obama-like breeziness and tact.”

The key paragraph: “The appeal [of Miles’ character] is so universal—or, some might say, neutral—that even right-wing pundits who have dedicated the past few years to getting mad at every superhero or children’s film with a minority lead seem to have mostly given Miles Morales a pass. In what must have come as a surprise to its readers, ‘Worth It or Woke?,’ a Web site that disapprovingly assesses the wokeness of Hollywood releases, recently gave ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ a positive eighty-one-per-cent rating.

“Though it determined that the film took a ‘beloved character’ and ‘race-swapped in the name of Leftist virtue signaling,’ it briefly included the movie in its list of films that were ‘worth it.’ (The recommendation was ultimately pulled when the author of the review noticed that one of the characters had a ‘Protect Trans Kids’ sign in her bedroom.)” [Of COURSE it was.]

So Across the Spider-Verse has managed to walk the fine line of creating “representation” without ticking off the people who find the concept an anathema.  Having Spideys from India and Japan, it appears, is OK by almost everyone.

The one structural difficulty is the same issue as Avengers: Infinity War; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1; and virtually every movie’s second act. I want to see the next film NOW.

Venue

I saw the film at the Regal Theatre at Colonie Center near Albany. It’s not my favorite venue, but, at the time, the Spectrum was closed on Wednesdays, fortunately no longer the case.

So many ads and infotainment! The noon movie started at 12:25.

Utica: The Last Refuge

Refugee and Immigration Support Services of Emmaus

On World Refugee Day, June 20, my wife and I, along with dozens of others, went to the Olpalka Gallery at the Sage College in Albany, NY, to see the documentary film Utica: The Last Refuge.

Utica is a Rust Belt city about an hour from Syracuse and an hour and a half from Albany that had seen better days. I remember my family trekking up there when I was growing up because my godparents, the Whitfields, lived there for a time.

So how did Utica, cold, sometimes snowy Utica, become a new home for a refugee family of four from Sudan? “The Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR) is regarded nationally as a model agency for how refugee resettlement is done, for how they guide Utica’s refugees into comfortable jobs and lives.” 

However, the process suddenly became more complicated in 2017 by political decisions that would impact the MVRCR budget.

A boon

The film began answering these questions: “Will Utica’s economic turnaround be slowed by a drop in incoming refugees? As refugee resettlement agencies across the country are forced to close their doors, will MVRCR survive? Will the Azein family find a way to support themselves? While much media attention is focused on where refugees first land, on beaches and in camps, Utica: The Last Refuge looks at why the future is so bleak for most refugees: the system is backed up.”

This program has been a success story for the community. “While the population is still only about 62,000 [from a high of over 100,000 in the 1960s], nearly 20% are now refugees and their children. Local politicians, from the Mayor on down, extol the virtues of Utica’s diversity. The refugees, they say, are hardworking and dedicated.”

As for the movie, “The Last Refuge team is a group of issue dedicated vérite filmmakers, many of whom came together as alumni of Hamilton College, which neighbors Utica.”

RISSE

The two showings at Olpaka constituted a fundraiser for RISSE, the Refugee and Immigration Support Services of Emmaus, “a family-based center that supports newcomers in building sustainable lives in the United States,” located in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Albany, not very far from my home.

“RISSE was founded in 2007… The initial goal was to help these refugees find housing, jobs, and resources and to advance their education. An after-school program was established for children; then came English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for adults.

“Volunteers, many of them immigrants… played a key role in the early success of RISSE… An early partnership with The College of Saint Rose and its art education, counseling, literacy, and community service programs provided expertise and volunteers that supported the growth of RISSE services.”

Several other entities offered literature at the reception that took place between the 3 pm and 6 pm showing. One was The USCRI Albany Field Office “Newly arrived refugees receive a comprehensive set of services including housing placement, cultural orientation, school enrollment, coordination of initial health appointments, referrals to ESL classes and employment preparation and placement.”

A short film

Related, I saw mention of the short film Translators. Here, director Rudy Valdez talks about the new film “and the overlooked experiences of child translators within immigrant families. The two-time Emmy Award winning filmmaker talked with AL DÍA ahead of the film’s June premiere at the L.A. Latino International Film Festival and Tribeca.

And here, “Valdez and Virginia Vasquez, a translator for her family featured in the documentary, joined New York Living. PIX 11.”

Watch Translators here.

Ramblin' with Roger
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