Tag: review

Movie review: She Said

#MeToo

she saidIn late November, my wife and I saw the new movie She Said at the Landmark cinema Spectrum 8 in Albany. It’s about New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan), who broke the story that helped drive the #Metoo movement, especially as it applied to the Hollywood establishment.

It felt like real journalism, partly because of the shots inside and outside the Times offices. Among the big takeaways is that good journalism is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

Finding the information and getting people to go on the record about sexual assaults by powerful people that took place years ago is difficult. When there are non-disclosure agreements involved, it’s even harder.

Add to this the reporters trying to have a semblance of a real life, with husbands and children – which felt genuine – and you also get the struggle of being working moms.

We liked it. The acting by the leads and by Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, and others was uniformly solid.

Compare and contrast

My issue is that it was a little too low-energy. I could not help but think about the film Spotlight. The stories are similar, the real-life story of a great northeastern newspaper – the Boston Globe –  taking on a powerful institution – the local Roman Catholic church – over abusing the less powerful.

Spotlight, though, was tenser.  In She Said, Harvey Weinstein offered threats of retaliation on the phone. But in Spotlight, it felt that if the reporters didn’t get it right, their investigative unit might have been dismantled, and the paper excoriated literally from the pulpits.  In Spotlight, the movie made me feel that a lot was at stake; She Said proclaimed it but was less successful in presenting it.

Still, I would recommend She Said. It ought to be seen. It did a terrible box office, despite decent reviews. There were fewer than a dozen people at our Thursday matinee, two men and the rest, women.

Movie review: Devotion (2022)

high flyers

Devotion 2022The newish film Devotion, which my wife and I saw at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany in early December, is based on a true story that was the subject of a bestselling book.

Elite US Navy fighter pilots were being trained in the early 1950s. One was a black man, Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), training close enough in Rhode Island to occasionally visit his wife Daisy (Christina Jackson) and their cute daughter. Things during training seemed surprisingly uncomplicated. But Brown feels inner turmoil, understandable when one is The First/The Only.

One of the other pilots is starting to forge a friendship with Brown, Lieutenant Tom Hudner (Glenn Powell). The plot gets more interesting when some men are on shore leave in France. Much of it involved a Famous Movie Star and other US military folks who are less comfortable with a black wingman.

Ultimately, the airmen are deployed to the Korean conflict. The airmen, especially Brown, are very good at what they do. Ultimately, stuff happens, and if you’ve read the book or most reviews, you have an idea what.

Most reviews are correct, with 81% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. One critic wrote, “It’s committed to the hallmarks of the genre, for better and for worse.” This is spot on.

It’s a good film, and I’m glad I saw it. It’s not extraordinary except for the very detailed use of the aircraft, some of which were borrowed from aeronautic museums. The look and the flying felt real.

Too much Devotion

Incidentally, I disliked the generic title devotion, which had been used as the titles of films in 1931, 1945, 1995, 2005, and 2013. The book title was  Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice by Adam Makos. Maybe Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice would have been less boring.

The 2022 Devotion was not a theatrical blockbuster, with less than $20 million in ticket sales, which is unfortunate.

Movie review: TÁR [Todd Fields]

Cate Blanchett will get an oscar nod

tar-movie-review-2022My wife and I went to see the late afternoon matinee of the movie TÁR back on November 10 at the Spectrum Theatre. There was, coincidentally, one other couple in the roomy theater, who we’ve known for years. Afterward, as the four of us mused about what we had just seen, a young man who worked at the cinema proclaimed, “Isn’t that the best movie EVER?”

The four patrons all agreed that Cate Blanchett inhabited the character of music conductor Lydia Tár wholly. It is not surprising that people sought Tár’s body of work only to discover that she was a fictional character.

Blanchett’s complex performance featured her actually playing the piano, something she hadn’t tried in decades; conducting and speaking German, which she learned for the role. Tár striking a punching back to the rhythm of Mozart’s A Little Night Music made me laugh aloud.

There were other touches of verisimilitude in the film that I really liked. The far too long introduction by a New Yorker writer before interviewing Lydia reminded a specific Writer’s Institute event I attended several years ago. Deutsche grammophon is the imprint of many of the classical recordings that many folks, including me, own.

Okay, and

But, as several of my friends asked me, what is the movie about? The Spectrum description says it “examines the changing nature of power, its impact, and durability in our modern world.” So it’s the looking away from the foibles of a talented artist, at least for a while? The power of the cancel culture? Is Icarus flying too close to the sun?

Mashable opined: “Like its protagonist, Tár is many things all at once: a psychological drama, a foray into horror, a (very) dry comedy, and a relationship drama.”

Friend Karen suggested that we are supposed to feel some sympathy for the conductor. This is even though, according to another of the movie’s other main characters, all of Tár’s relationships, save one, are transactional. That is dead on.

Over a week later, I’m still musing about the film. It was good to see it in a movie theater with speakers. I think this would be too claustrophobic to watch on the small screen. And I did love not just the music but the thought and process of creating a performance.

So I looked at some of the reviews; 92% were positive from the critics, but only 72% from the audience. From The Guardian: “a singularly strange offering from US writer-director Todd Field.” I cannot argue with that.

That’s not my take

But I will dispute Amy Taubin’s assessment in ArtForum. “Cate Blanchett, playing one overblown note in Todd Field’s imbecilic and carelessly racist TÁR.” The characterization is based on the fact that “Field cuts from the concert halls and trophy residential real estate of Berlin and New York… to the filthy streets and decaying buildings of an unnamed Southeast Asian country…”

No, it was not a one-note performance. And, as my friend David divined, it’s a particular country, as a reptilian reference in the dialogue would suggest.

I’m glad I saw it, yet I don’t imagine I’d watch it again. 178 minutes is a long haul that’s so…internal.As Charles Koplinski noted, “TÁR is a movie you admire more than enjoy.”

Movie – Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song

September Cohen

Leonard CohenWhen we were in the Berkshires last week, my wife recommended that we go to the Images Cinema in downtown Williamstown, MA, to see the documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. She knew this would be the type of film I would be interested in seeing. I didn’t even know of its existence.

It is, the New York Times called “a definitive exploration of [the] singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen as seen through the prism of his internationally renowned hymn.”

It starts off with the poet and perhaps dilatant songwriter too shy to go out on stage. His then-new friend, Judy Collins, who had just covered his song Suzanne, went out on stage with him. He developed some confidence in performing, but developed some bad, though not uncommon, habits.

Leonard and his producer created an album containing Hallelujah and other good songs. In 1984, his label, Columbia, initially rejected it! (Yet they released an overdone album produced by Phil Spector.) The path of the song, involving perhaps 150 verses, Bob Dylan, John Cale, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, and far too many versions from American Idol and similar programs, is a fascinating tale.

Then in his seventies, Leonard has a musical resurgence. I have two albums of his from the 2010s, which I enjoy. He died in 2016 at the age of 82.

Rarities

“Approved for production by Leonard Cohen just before his 80th birthday in 2014, the film accesses a wealth of never-before-seen archival materials from the Cohen Trust, including Cohen’s personal notebooks, journals and photographs, performance footage, and extremely rare audio recordings and interviews.” The film’s copyright is 2021, but the release date was July 15, 2022.

At some point, Leonard considered changing his first name to September. It’s not only his birth month, but it is also the month that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur often fall. I was particularly fascinated with him negotiating with his religious beliefs.

As luck would have it, Kelly has already written an essay about the song and has linked it to a Cohen version of Hallelujah.

The documentary is recommended if you can find it.

Movies: Elvis; Mr. Malcolm’s List

jilted

After seeing the new movie Elvis – and knowing the limitations of the biopic genre – I wish my father were still around so that we could debate the merits, but not the film per se. It was more that he hated Elvis for his cultural appropriation. I believe that the film showed that the kid from Tupelo, MS (the young Australian actor Chaydon Jay) came by his love of black music honestly. (Unlike, say, Pat Boone covering Little Richard’s Tutti Fruiti.)

When my wife and I saw the previews a few months ago, featuring the somewhat older Elvis (the magnetic Austin Butler), my wife asked, “Was Elvis REALLY that sexy?” I SHOULD have said, “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong!” which is (sort of) the title of one of his greatest hits albums. Instead, I just said, “Yes, yes, he was.” Her query comes from only being familiar with the “fat Elvis” stuck in Vegas.

I liked it a lot. Sean P. Means of The Movie Cricket wrote, “It’s big, bold, and brassy. It’s not perfect, and at 2 hours and 39 minutes still doesn’t deliver everything you’d expect in a telling of Elvis’s life story. But it’s always holding your attention.” Yeah, that’s about right.

Who is that?

It’s always nice to see the bits one’s aware of, such as Elvis singing to an actual hound dog on Steve Allen’s show. I don’t know exactly what his relationship with some of the black stars of the era was, but it was fun to try to identify them. I didn’t recognize B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) or Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.). Still, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), and especially Little Richard (Alton Mason) were obvious to me. Sadly, Shonka Dukureh died recently.

The one aspect I’m still puzzling about is Tom Hanks’ accent as Colonel Tom Parker. It’s…weird. Parker biographer Alanna Nash says that’s not what he sounded like, which frankly doesn’t bother me. Nash said, “He didn’t have an impediment — he was just trying to wrap a Dutch tongue around the English language, Southern-style… But [director Baz Luhrmann] wanted to make him seem more ‘other.’ Or as Baz told me in an interview, ‘I thought it was very important that Tom presents the audience with a strangeness, a sort of ‘What is going on with this guy?'”

But “Nash did say that there are some things Baz Luhrmann got right with Elvis. This includes the suggestion that Parker did all he could to prevent Presley from fulfilling his dream of embarking on a European tour. It was unfortunate for Presley, as the reason had nothing to do with the singer but with Parker’s lack of a passport.”

I suspect Austin Butler will get an Academy Award nomination for playing Elvis. His energy and charisma, and talent are tremendous. All in all, I recommend the movie.

Very Jane Austen-y

MrMalcolmsList“A young woman courts a mysterious wealthy suitor in 19th century England.” That’s the premise of the newish movie Mr. Malcolm’s List. Do you want more? “When she fails to meet an item on his list of requirements for a bride, Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) is jilted by London’s most eligible bachelor, Mr. Malcolm (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù). Feeling humiliated and determined to exact revenge, she convinces her friend Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto) to play the role of his ideal match. Soon, Mr. Malcolm wonders whether he’s found the perfect woman…or the perfect hoax.”

My wife loves this stuff and was very fond of the film. I thought it was fine, and the diverse cast was entertaining.

We saw both films at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in July 2022.