Tag: review

Movie review: Cold War (2018- Zimna wojna)

Pawel Pawlikowski, who was justifiably been nominated for a best director Oscar for Cold War, won at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cold War Zimna wojnaIf you don’t like everything about Cold War, the Best Foreign Film nominee from Poland, you may enjoy the nearly continually wave of music. It starts with a guy playing something that sounds, but doesn’t look, like bagpipes, and another fellow playing a fiddle. They alternately play and sing some folk song.

The viewer sees a couple traveling the countryside of Poland just after World War II, looking for authentic folk singers from the countryside. I imagine it was like how ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded musicians from the southern US and elsewhere.

Then the singers and dancers are culled in some Lawrence Welkian American Idol cattle call, with the best ones trained at a boarding school. They tour and become an unexpected hit.

But an apparatchik wants more songs touting Lenin and Stalin. It is cold war Poland in the early 1950s by then.

All of this is backdrop for an intense, “fatefully mismatched” love story between the singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and the music director Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) which drives the story. Can one be more free in Communist Poland than in Paris? The movie’s tagline: “Love has no borders.”

The cinematography by Lukasz Zal is often gorgeous. His Oscar nomination is well-deserved. He has already won an award from the American Society of Cinematographers, USA. There is an early scene in the black-and-white film where even a mud path looks like beautiful marble.

Pawel Pawlikowski, who was justifiably been nominated for a best director Oscar, won at the Cannes Film Festival. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Piotr Borkowski.

Cold War is in Polish and French, subtitled. It’s rated R “for some sexual content, nudity and language.” It contains one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, seriously, done with mirrors.

My wife and I saw it, naturally, at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. I’ve asked for the soundtrack for my birthday.

Movie review: Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku)

the movie Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) will be available on DVD on February 12.

ShopliftersMy wife and I had just seen the movie Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. A young woman of our acquaintance said, “I don’t know why it got such positive buzz. I thought it was meh.”

I totally understood. The film was a little slow to develop, and even at the end of the two hours, we had questions about the various relationships. Yet we thought it was very much worth seeing.

The story involved a Japanese family with the folks generally underemployed. Some of them resort to… well, see the title… to survive. There’s a code that comes with such thievery, which is that while it’s still in the store, it’s not really stealing.

Their lives get complicated when they find a young girl stuck outside in the cold. They take her in, and are surprised that, at first, no one reports her missing. She begins to learn the family “trade”.

One takeaway is the notion of what constitutes family. The father discusses the boy’s adolescent urgings in a way I’ve never seen before in cinema, precise but not too complicated.

This is a film by director Hirokazu Kor-eeda, whose work I am totally unfamiliar with. He seems well-regarded, with all of the films he wrote and/or directed as least 85% positive in Rotten Tomatoes. Shoplifters is 99% positive with the critics. The performances were strong.

The predominant description of the movie in reviews is that, in many ways it feels Dickensian, like a fresh take on Oliver Twist, as one put it. I’m not sure I would have come up with that parallel myself, but it’s not inaccurate. Why else would we be rooting for, at some level, people who are regularly breaking the law?

Shoplifters will be available on DVD on February 12. I’d be interested in the opinions of others on this movie from Japan which was nominated as Best Foreign Film for this season’s Oscars.

Movie review: Ralph Breaks the Internet

Shank (Gal Gadot) is from the online auto-racing game called Slaughter Race

Ralph Breaks the InternetThe first movie I went to see after the Academy Award nominations were announced was Ralph Breaks the Internet, a possible pick for Best Animated Feature. It is the sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw with a room full of kids, which definitely helped define the experience.

Whereas my daughter and I saw RBTI at the Regal Theater in Colonie Center on a Thursday afternoon, and there was no one else there. A couple people slipped in late to make out in the back and left well before it was over.

Ralph (voice of John C. Reilly) and Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) have a nice, predictable existence: work by day in their respective games at the arcade, and hang out as best friends after hours.

But an incident puts Vanellope’s race car game, Sugar Rush, in peril. The friends enter the word of the Internet, which is as overwhelming as really it sometimes is. With some help of KnowItAll (Alan Tudyk) they navigate a dizzying array of options to find what they need on eBay. But how to pay for it?

Yesss (Taraji P. Henson) is the head algorithm of the trend-making site “BuzzzTube” and her segments speak to the cultural phenomena that pop up nearly daily, as well as some of the downsides.

Is Ralph Breaks the Internet an advertisement of the fact that Disney owns everything? The princesses, most or all voiced by the original performers, I liked a lot. The movie has fun with their various personas. 3CPO (Anthony Daniels), is on only briefly. And speaking of brief, you see the late Stan Lee for about two seconds.

Shank (Gal Gadot) is from the online auto-racing game called Slaughter Race, a far cry from Sugar Rush. She has a cadre of assistants, but she’s the great character on her own. 

There’s one scene that was pure King Kong. Ultimately, the movie was about how friendships evolve. Part of me that thought the movie was overstuffed with in-jokes and another that says that’s fine because one can catch more of them on repeated viewing.

If you get to the VERY end, you’ll see the previews from FROZEN 2; hey, I laughed.

Bottom line is that my daughter, who doesn’t always convey her feelings at the cinema, told my wife (not me) that she really liked the film. I thought it was good, not great, though I know I would have enjoyed it more if I could have gauged audience reaction.

Movie review: The Favourite (2018)

The acting in the Favourite by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone was excellent.

The Favourite Yorgos Lanthimos
Weisz, Stone, Colman

Unless you’re paying close attention to movie releases, it may have been confusing to see two costume dramas released about the same time frame. One was The Favourite, set in the early 18th century with England is at war with the French, and Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is unwell. The other was Mary, Queen of Scots, with the titular character (Saoirse Ronan) struggling to regain the English throne against Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie).

My wife and I opted for the former at The Spectrum in Albany because it fared better with the critics (94% positive) than Mary (62% positive). Moreover, people whose opinions I value also liked it.

The Favourite is, I gather, supposed to be comedy posing as a historical drama with a touch of palace intrigue. The humor (humour?) presumably was supposed to come from these British historical figures who one would think would be stuffy and reserved. Instead, they’re bawdy and crude. The concept I think is a valid one.

It didn’t work for me. Perhaps the film was just too weird. I didn’t laugh very much, though the disco dancing – seriously – was entertaining. The ending had several of us in the theater after the lights came up discussing it with WTH bemusement. The revenge of the bunnies?

This is is not to say that it was without merit. The acting, by Colman; Rachel Weisz as aide de camp Lady Sarah, who often acted as head of state; and Emma Stone as Sarah’s cousin Abigail, who had fallen on hard times and finesses her way into the Queen’s good graces, was excellent. The class struggle narrative was interesting, though it fell apart. My wife noted, correctly, that Weisz is “a very handsome woman,” and Rachel and I share a birthday.

I wish I had seen The Lobster (2015), which Yorgos Lanthimos not only directed but also co-wrote. I recall that most people either loved or hated it. It also featured Weisz, and in a small role, Colman.

The Favourite is going to get all sorts of technical nominations, maybe for cinematography, costume design and other categories. My wife mused that it was a movie for which we were somehow not privy to the code. I don’t regret seeing it, but I shan’t watch it again.

Movie review: If Beale Street Could Talk

The narrative is nonlinear, bouncing around in time, but one always knows where we are in the story.

If Beale Street Could TalkThere was a trailer for If Beale Street Could Talk which I must have seen a half dozen times. You know how some previews tell you so much that you feel as though there’s no need to see the film at all? This one was quite the opposite as I could hear, more than once, puzzled utterances from the audience.

The movie was written for the screen and directed by Barry Jenkins, the creative force behind Moonlight, which beat out La La Land for best picture. It is based on the book by James Baldwin. The story is set in 1974, but, in many ways, it could have been 2018.

The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street.” Though the original Beale Street is in Memphis, this story is clearly in New York City.

Without being a spoiler, I’ll tell you that the movie is primarily a love story in the midst of an unjust system. Tish Rivers (newcomer KiKi Layne) and Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt (Stephan James from the Homecoming TV Series) have known each other forever. Their friendship evolved into love. Tish and her family struggle to prove Fonny innocent of a terrible crime.

The narrative is nonlinear, bouncing around in time, but one always knows where we are in the story. Yes, there are a couple terrible folks. But there’s also great kindness and generosity bestowed upon the couple. And why not? My wife, in particular, LOVED this attractive pairing.

Regina King deserves her Golden Globe for best supporting actress as Sharon, Tish’s mom. In a smaller role, Aunjanue Ellis is also strong as Fonny’s mom. Some critics thought the film wasn’t gritty enough, to which I suggest that not every film about black people need be oppressively bleak. A mote legitimate complaint, I suppose, is too much music doing the atmospheric lifting, but it’s a minor quibble.

Only at the very end does If Beale Street Could Talk become a tad pedantic, and by that point, it was earned. As usual, my wife and I saw it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

Ramblin' with Roger
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