Poor Things (2023)

Watching Poor Things felt like watching a very good Terry Gilliam movie.  There's an interesting alternate-Victorian world, interesting camera shots, and good actors playing unusual characters in the style of a James Whale production.  

There are numerous sex scenes in the middle act that started to feel gratuitous.

The initial direction of the story is good: "what if a person tried to live according to experimentation and scientific thought?"  Though really not simply a person, because while Bella is our protagonist, Godwin models this behavior for her, as does Max (though Max is positioned as more of a partner than teacher).

Unfortunately I think the film sabotages its story in the final minutes.

<spoilers>

Bella's character at her core is non-violent, against doing permanent harm to others, and looking to improve herself and the world around her.  That is, right up until she replaces Victoria Blessington's husband's brain with that of a goat (or sheep), and the final scene has her sipping gin in her father's garden.  I was shocked that she hadn't put Godwin's brain into Alfie's body!  Godwin had a tortured childhood and lived in a body marked by scars that people stared at; if Bella put his brain into Alfie's body, she could allow him to go on his own adventure of discovery, closing the circle of the story that began with Godwin letting Bella go.  As is, Alfie's fate is purely retribution.

Past Lives (2023)

 Got Past Lives out of the library and watched it last night, so now I've seen 3 of the Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture from 2023.  I think Barbie is still my favorite, but definitely enjoyed Past Lives.  There isn't much plot to speak of; in the opening scene we are presented three people at a bar and voiceover wondering how they're related to one another.  We then jump back 24 years to the childhood of two of them in South Korea, just before one of them emigrates** to Canada.  We then jump to 12 years later, when these two reconnect for a while online, and the one in Canada meets and marries a New Yorker.  Finally we return to present day, when the person who stayed in Korea visits New York.

Because Celine Song (the writer/director) doesn't invent events to create artificial drama, the story can focus on the thoughts and feelings the characters have and their interrelationships.  There are strong themes about living across/between cultures.

I fondly recalled the Before Trilogy while watching this, and prefer this style of storytelling to that of One Day, the series (I haven't read the book or seen the film), which I felt invented things for the characters to do and to happen to them to create artificial drama.  

** in the subtitles, they speak of "immigrating to Canada", but IMO while in South Korea they are emigrating from South Korea to Canada.  

Doctor Sleep (2019)

I got Doctor Sleep out of the library and watched it last night.  It's Ewan MacGregor's "reluctant mentor" warm-up before the Kenobi series?  It's the sequel to The Shining that I'm not sure we needed?  At 150 minutes, it's a little longer than the original film, but there's a lot of material to get through.

This film is a sequel to the Kubrick film, which departed in a number of ways from the novel, and so Doctor Sleep the movie must make some changes to account for the fact that the Overlook Hotel survived while Dick Halloran did not.  

The cast is excellent all around, with special kudos to Alex Essoe, Henry Thomas, and Roger Dale Floyd, who play Wendy, Jack and (young) Danny Torrance.

I would have liked some members of the True Knot to feel less like nameless goons.  Rose, Andi, and Crow Daddy get distinct personalities; I couldn't even tell you what powers the others had.  Rose would only let people into her crew who could contribute, so each member of the True Knot should feel like a more fully fleshed out character.  If there isn't time in a 2.5 hour movie to develop them, they should be cut. 

I think I was hoping for a more introspective story about Danny and his past; the poster, which shows young Danny facing grown-up Danny facing each other in a hallway of the Overlook Hotel, seems to promise this.  Instead, this is really Abra's story of fighting psychic vampires where the titular "Doctor Sleep" plays a supporting role as Abra's mentor.  Which is fine.  It's just not clear that this needs to be a sequel to The Shining, or could instead have been an independent story.

Romeo and Juliet (2013)

There are so many film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet that any new version must face the question: was this necessary?  Well, perhaps.  Since Zeffirelli's version, there have been three major adaptations that I know of:

1. Baz Luhrmann's magnum opus Romeo + Juliet, which was true to the dialogue while messing with the setting,
2. Shakespeare in Love, which messes with the story (I mean, yeah, technically it isn't Romeo & Juliet, but close enough),
3. this one. 

So, perhaps it was time to once again have a version that was true to the setting.  Still, it's hard to compete with Claire Danes, Gwyneth Paltrow, young Leonardo di Caprio, Joseph Fiennes, and especially Harold Perrineau (there will never be another film Mercutio like his). 

So, what can the 2013 version do to compete?  Well, they:

• have some fabulous locations and set design.
• have a wonderful Benvolio in Kodi-Smit McPhee.  In the opening minutes when it wasn't entirely clear who the characters were, we were hoping beyond hope that he was Romeo.
• scored Paul Giamatti as Friar Laurence.  Unfortunately, they've fallen in love with the fact that they scored Paul Giamatti as the friar, and give him more screen time than the role deserves (it's Romeo & Juliet, not Romeo & Juliet & Friar Laurence).
• mess with the story, and appear to make Mercutio a champion of the Montagues, rather than a friend of Romeo's and essentially an innocent bystander to, and tragic casualty of, the feud, thus sapping all the energy from "a plague on both your houses". There is one change that I actually really like, but don't want to spoil it.

TRON: Tarnished Legacy?

Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a good TRON sequel movie, perhaps even several different good versions out there, but this isn't one of them.  We saw it in 3D in the theater, which neither helped nor particularly hurt the experience, but did induce a little eyestrain and made an already dark movie even darker.  I will probably not be going to another 3D movie anytime soon.

Like Tycho, I have a lot of questions and concerns, from the worthiness of the bad guys compared to Dillenger/Sark and the MCP from the first film, to the number of scenes that have no energy/don't add anything in terms of character development or plot (I'm looking at you, dinner party and bad guys searching Flynn's place, to name two), to the fact that Zuse's nightclub brought on painful flashbacks to the Merovingian.  It's a shame, really, because while I liked the actor who plays Zuse in Frost/Nixon, he's wasted here.  Likewise with Jeff Bridges.  I can't tell whether he's disinterested or has lost a step, but the great spirit that helped carry the first film out of mediocrity is gone, and he appears caught between playing his original character (with a dash of the Dude) and Obadiah Stane.  Garrett Hedlund is all right, I guess, but his character is a poor mix of Bruce Wayne and the Chris Pine Kirk.  It's Olivia Wilde who comes off best in their scenes together, and I'll actually be looking to netflix something else with her in it.

Off the grid, it's a crime that Cillian Murphy doesn't have more to do.  I really liked his cameo and think that his role is expanded in one of the good versions out in the multiverse.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

Scarlett Johansson perfectly captures the pose of Vermeer's model, and there are some good scenes where Vermeer (played by Colin Firth) talks about his craft, but... the film oozes with melodrama and Johansson's character reacts to everything with the same dumbstruck look of surprise.  We must be starting to scrape the bottom of our Netflix backlog.  Thankfully they keep making new movies.

Nora (2000)

An aspiring writer and his lover leave Ireland to live together in Trieste and try to lead a life away from the constrictive social norms of County Galway.  We follow their trials and tribulations as he discovers she's not the muse who can discuss literature (and particularly *his* writing) that he'd been hoping for, becomes jealous of the possibility that she is seeing other men, grows distant from her and their children (born out of wedlock), and ultimately forge a lasting and loving relationship... and somehow it's utterly boring.  


The acting is fine, but the script is not.  From the start, their relationship works on a physical level, but they don't really connect intellectually.  By the end, it's not really clear how they've managed to become friends as well as lovers.  Certainly nothing that happens on screen suggests it, until they are walking contentedly together down the lane while text appears to tell us they stayed together happily until they died.

The Secret of Kells (2009)

The Secret of Kells is beautiful to watch.  I'm not sure the stories really come together; the Aisling-Brendan relationship is the centerpiece of the movie, but she disappears without a trace once he gets the crystal (though the white wolf appears briefly as he and Aidan make their escape), so I'm left with unanswered questions, mainly what happened to Aisling?  Does Brendan ever think about her?  I would have been happy with a simple acknowledgement of his childhood friendship as he passes through the woods on the way back to Kells.  We don't need to actually see Aisling, I just want to see him thinking about her and looking at and listening to her woods -- maybe he's come to disbelieve that there ever was a wolf girl in the woods and he imagined her, maybe once he's a grown up illuminator of the Gospel he doesn't need any childish paganism any more (though I can't quite accept that :-).  Maybe something like that was there and I missed it, but it seemed like Brendan simply goes back to Kells to talk to his uncle. 

Snow Cake (2006)

Has autism become passé?  Dustin Hoffman rode it to a Best Actor Oscar in 1988 by playing someone with roughly the same affect and self-direction as Ben Braddock.  Leonardo DiCaprio got a Best Supporting nomination in '93 for What's Eating Gilbert Grape.  Sean Penn got a nomination in '01 for I am Sam.  


So why no love for Sigourney Weaver?  Ignoring the ridiculousity of Carrie-Ann Moss's character staying in that podunk for 12 years instead of moving to the city (and it *is* ridiculous; that desperately required some explanation, even a throwaway line that gives us something to cling to while we suspend disbelief), this is a good little film in which Weaver succeeds at portraying a more difficult character than Raymond Babbitt.  It's not like the Academy was full up at the Best Actress slot; they gave a nomination to Meryl Streep for the Devil Wears Prada!  And yes, I love watching Meryl Streep, and she's having a ton of fun in Prada, but it's not more worthy of a Best Actress nomination than Sigourney Weaver in Snow Cake.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

I'm always nervous about watching old comedies, even highly rated ones; some of them make me worried about generational differences in perception of humor and my kids won't understand that Better Off Dead is a work of genius.  Some Like It Hot starts off shaky, but if they cut the first 15 minutes, which don't tell us anything we need to know, it's pretty good.  Certainly not best comedy of all time good (and not even as good as Better Off Dead), but it has a great last line and I'm glad I saw it.

Ondine (2009)

Ondine is about a modern-day Irish fisherman (Colin Farrell) who pulls a woman out of the water in his nets.  Just a few minutes into the film, I had the following questions:

1. Was Neil Jordan watching Splash one night and thought, "What if we made this a drama instead of a comedy?"  Nah, probably not.  Jordan probably grew up with selkie myths.
2. Given that Neil Jordan is the director, will Ondine turn out to actually be a guy selkie?
3. Why in Zeus's name did Oliver Stone think that Farrell could possibly play Alexander?  Sigh.  I think this every time we watch a movie with Farrell in it; even Veronica Guerin.  Fortunately he's up to the task of playing a kind-hearted but not-so-bright guy in this film.  In fact, he's great!

In the end, and all in all, this was a good little film.  I didn't like some of the camerawork, and I don't quite believe Syracuse's bender, but the girl who plays Annie grows on you and Bachleda actually knows how to swim and does a nice butterfly stroke in one scene.  This would be 7 of 10, and I can't quite bring myself to give it 4 of 5.  Netflix, give me more granularity!!

Clash of the Titians

Instead of an agonizingly, epically, and embarrassingly bad on all possible levels "remake" of the 1981 classic, I envision a film about the evolution of the great painter's style, from the early self-portrait to his more mature (and synergistic to this post) Danaë series to the final Pieta.  Maybe we'll throw in a gratuitous fistfight when Michelangelo criticizes Titian's draughtsmanship.

The Island (2005)

We are so far behind on our bad SF movies.  Okay, so we've got one part Logan's Run, one part the Prisoner, one part THX-1138, and it's all a big mess that ends with further proof that Ewan McGregor can't carry the part of a traditional action movie hero -- alert!  A young Harrison Ford is not walking through that door, so stop trying to write and direct as if that's what you've got!  McGregor brings other skills to the project, so use them!

And as usual, the writing is a problem here.  The concept is all right, nothing wrong with that, but the only scene in which the writers made me feel like I'm watching people raised differently from me is when Gandu Three Echo and Neelix get the censor to slip and they discover the word "Dood!"  Otherwise, there's just so much I have trouble with.  So, I'm supposed to believe that Buscemi and McGregor are friends, and I get the impression that the relationship is at least a few months old, but that McGregor has just noticed Buscemi's pin-up collection for the first time?  Now I'm distracted thinking about that instead of paying attention to the plot.  Oh.  Ohhhhh.... I get it now.  Well, at least during all the action-y sequences all the characters seem to do reasonably intelligent things, and Ewan and Scarlett's escape doesn't rely upon the blinding stupidity of their captors.  I guess that saves this from dropping below three stars.

So, now Mark Christopher Lawrence is my hero of the movie for playing the part of the Construction Worker and delivering the lines:

 

Construction Worker: [after Lincoln and Jordan had fallen from the building, he grabs Lincoln] Jesus must love you! [then helping Jordan]  I *know* Jesus loves you!

"Jordan" is Scarlett Johansson's character.  Out of context, it's not as funny, but it's the right line at the right time.

The Station Agent (2003)

This languished in our netflix queue for years, and now we have seen for ourselves that it sucks to be a talented  actor like Peter Dinklage when Hollywood doesn't have any roles for you that weren't specifically written for dwarfs.  Of course, it does mean that he's the natural choice to be the angry, frustrated dwarf supreme, Tyrion Lannister.  And, of course, it's a sign of how badly the Song of fire and Ice has gone that when I told Sarahmac that Dinklage would be playing Tyrion Lannister, all I got was a blank look, and when I said it would be in a TV Series of A Game of Thrones, she asked whether it was based on some video game she'd never heard of.


==spoilers, about the actual movie==


I wanted to really like The Station Agent.  I *liked* the slow, measured  storytelling that characterizes most of the film, so why do we need the suicide attempt?  Answer: we don't.  It's a poor attempt to inject some Drama!(tm) into a movie that didn't need it.  bleah.

The Ghost Writer (2010) and Remember Me (2010)

It has actually been several weeks since Sarahmac forced me to watch Remember Me.  I dithered on writing anything about it for various reasons, but perhaps most importantly I was reading the Sports Guy's NBA draft diary as we started watching the movie, and then we had to pause a few minutes in so Sarahmac could read those first few paragraphs.  That almost sums it up; nothing more needed to be said, and then we saw The Ghost Writer.  Not only did both these movies lose an entire star (on the 5-star netflix scale) in a 10 second span in the last five minutes of film, but they suddenly and irrevocably (for me) heralded the end of Pierce Brosnan's leading man status.  We're now 8 years removed from his last Bond film, and he's now being cast as "the older man" figure for lightweights like Robert Pattinson and Ewan McGregor.  To be clear here, I like Ewan McGregor and we've netflixed movies specifically to see him; however, he's nervous and meek.  He's endearing, but he completely lacks Brosnan's assured virility.  This is what didn't quite ring true about McGregor's portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi -- he could channel Alec Guinness's mannerisms all he liked (and he did that quite well), but without the ability to command attention with calm assurance, well...

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

This finally came up in the netflix queue, but we weren't exactly looking forward to it... knocking the writer and primary actors, in order: we'd seen Streetcar and were underwhelmed, I tend to appreciate Paul Newman as an actor without liking the movie**, I'm wary of the celebrity of Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives is best known to me as a talking snowman.  So did I genuinely really like this movie, or were my expectations just set low?  I think... I think I actually liked it!  Definitely more so than Gigi, which won Best Picture that year, but perhaps not as much as Separate Tables, and Niven would definitely get my imaginary vote over Newman for Best Actor that year.  But for Burl Ives to not be nominated for his work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (he won Best Supporting for The Big Country that year) is shameful -- he has the best lines and delivers.  To my mind, Ives and Taylor are really the stars of this movie and Newman is the supporting actor.  


Now the question is: should I take a chance on another Taylor movie?  She won an Oscar for BUtterfield 8, but I liked the book and enjoyed Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, so maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.


** The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid being the exceptions.

Musicals that don't work -- Corpse Bride (2005) and Gigi (1958)

After the opening musical number of Corpse Bride, I turned to Sarah and asked "you don't think this is going to be a musical, is it?" "I'm afraid so." "Damn."  Danny Elfman is a brilliant composer of quirky instrumental music, but this had the musical quality of a mediocre Rankin and Bass special.  Finis Everglot even looks a bit like a hairless Heat Miser.  The basic premise is great, the animation is beautiful, and the short scene between Victor/Victoria at the piano has real feeling to it, but that's about it.  The story has been stretched thin so it's just barely feature film length, and could anything be more trite and unnecessary than the fight between Victor and Barkis?  


We had high hopes for Gigi; it won the Best Picture Oscar** and was a Lerner and Loewe vehicle with Andre Previn overseeing the scoring -- it's like a proto-My Fair Lady!  Leslie Caron even has a small spark of Audrey Hepburn's magnificent screen presence, and Gigi has some of Eliza's innocence and spunk.  Gaston and Honoré are a bit like Higgins and Pickering, though sadly while Higgins is charmingly contemptible Gaston is merely contemptible.  We don't exactly start off on the right foot, with Honoré signing the unfortunate "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" that was soundly mocked by SNL in its first season, and then we meet Gigi, and then we spend far too much time with Gaston, and we're nearly halfway through the movie before we get back to Gigi.  Help!  We're dying of thirst!  Give us more of the character that has a little life to her!  Interestingly, perhaps because Gaston is so unlikable, the moment with the greatest feeling between two characters comes during the "I Remember it Well" sequence with Honoré and Madame Alvarez (the YouTube video unfortunately cuts out the dialogue prior to the song, and that is vital to properly understand their relationship).  Let's just chalk this up as a practice run for My Fair Lady, in which they got everything right.


** over Auntie Mame, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Separate Tables, and the Defiant Ones.  I doubt it would win a re-vote now.  My imaginary vote would go to Separate Tables, but I'm a sucker for David Niven.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

This won 7 Academy Awards (8 if you include the honorary Oscar given to Harold Russell), but I can't help but feel that while The Best Years of Our Lives is an important film from a historical perspective, it really doesn't hold up artistically after 60 years, and bad pacing is the primary culprit.


** mild spoilers **


It starts well, with Dana Andrews returning home from the war and unable to get a flight home.  His struggles to get on a domestic flight are contrasted with a comfortable-looking "fat cat" civvie who happily pays a surcharge because he has too much luggage.  Finally, Dana picks up his single bag and heads off to the other side of the airfield, where other vets are waiting to catch flights home as they become available, and makes friends with Frederic March and Harold Russell (a double amputee with hooks for hands), who all happen to come from the same town.  They fly over the American heartland together and think about this great country they've fought for, and are concerned about what it will be like to go home.  They take a cab together, and each gets dropped off in turn.


Harold is worried about how his family and his girl will react to his prostheses; Frederic is worried about how he'll reacclimate to life as a wealthy banker; Dana was mostly concerned with being dropped off last, because he's slightly embarrassed that his family is so poor.  When he gets home, he find out that his wife has been living "in town" and has a job working late at a nightclub.  So Dana goes out to look for her.  Meanwhile, Frederic has taken his wife (Myrna Loy of The Thin Man fame) and daughter (who is out of HS and has been volunteering at the hospital) "out on the town", and Harold (after a painfully set up scene in which he drops a glass because of his hooks) goes for a walk to his Uncle Butch's bar (wonderfully played by Hoagy Carmichael), and naturally, soon enough Dana and Frederic (and his wife and daughter) end up there, too.  Dana and Frederic's daughter hit it off, though nothing can come of it because he's married, but by the end of the drunken evening he still can't find his wife, and so Frederic's wife and daughter drag him to their home to spend the night.  Dana has nightmares and Frederic's daughter sits by him until he can go back to sleep.  In the morning, there's palpable tension between the two, but Dana still has to go find his wife.


So far, so great!  But then there's an hour and a half of film devoted to a steady stream of scenes shot at the same steady pace to illustrate how they're having trouble "going home".  Harold refuses to believe his girl still loves him, takes up rifle practice in the garage, and scares his little sister.  Frederic has a drinking problem, his son is confused by his HS teacher about whether it was OK to drop the bomb on Japan, his daughter is in love with a married man, and his bank is too conservative with giving loans to veterans.  Dana can't find a good job and his wife loved the man in uniform, not the soda jerk.  This should be compelling stuff, but not when delivered in a cinematic monotone.


On the plus side, it ends well, with Dana Andrews reliving a war memory and then finally getting a decent job.  (there's a final scene with Harold's marriage, but it's just tidying up)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

So far this is the hidden gem of the aughts.  I'd never heard of it before trolling for Val Kilmer films to add to the netflix queue several months ago.  Seeing it wasn't a high priority because of all the crap that Val has been in (and netflix rated it slightly under 3 stars of 5 based on my prior ratings), and though I was slightly intrigued by the pairing with Robert Downey, Jr., the reality is that in 2005 (i.e., prior to Iron Man) they were both basically "damaged goods" as far as the potential quality of the movie was concerned, but my word, can they act, and in this case, they were supported by great writing. 


The script, partly based on a novel by Brett Halliday, gives us a comedy noir that constantly pokes fun at the noir genre, mocks itself, and breaks the fourth wall at will.  It has a running gag about grammar.  Actually, there are several independently running gags, and things mentioned offhandedly and irrelevantly in one scene (like how silly putty picks up stuff from comics) are used later on to the delight of those paying attention (as the visuals for a monologue about Michelle Monaghan's character's backstory, who, btw, is a very worthy member of the main trio).  


The end result is a bit like an Elmore Leonard film adaptation dialed up to 11.  No, we haven't learned anything by the end of the film (unless you didn't know how to use adverbs properly) but there are much less satisfactory ways to spend 2 hours of your life. Hm, if I were famous, do you think they'd use that as the quote on the poster?  At any rate, go see this if you haven't, and feel free to laugh at me if you saw it in the theater during its first release.

Mamma Mia! (2008) and It's Complicated (2009)

The marvelous Meryl Streep is awash in aging men!  And lucky her, they're all younger than she is!  (save for the well preserved Steve Martin, 4 years her senior)

So... the best part of Mamma Mia! is when the elder women sing "Dancing Queen" and "Waterloo" just before and then during the end credits.  Amanda Seyfried and her beau are charming, but the actors cast as her potential fathers aren't very good singers, and this is particularly problematic in the case of Pierce Brosnan.  There's also an issue with the setting; at times I feel like we're in the Greek islands, and at times I feel like we're in the Caribbean (especially when Christine Baranski goes down to the beach and sings to the bartender).  Overall it feels like a story whose thinness works fine as a stage production but doesn't really make it as a film.

To clarify: it's not just that the plot is simple -- It's Complicated also has a relatively simple plot, but the script, the story, is not just a vehicle to get to the next musical number (or plot point), but gives us human reasons why the characters act the way they do without unnecessarily vilifying anyone... except perhaps the 5 year-old.  Yes, Agness gets vilified by Meryl's friends (and it was nice that in both this and Mamma Mia! that Meryl has a posse of aging women friends), but that's natural in the context of those characters in that moment; what I mean is that the script doesn't make her "the bad guy (gal)" and so you can actually feel some sympathy for her when she finally learns she's being cheated on.  Yeah, Meryl's ex is a jerk, but human.  We get to see a lot of him over the course of the movie, so we've seen his sleazy charms that attracted her to him at first and slowly experienced the behaviors that drove them apart.

Two other things of note:

• We thought John Krasinski, who plays Meryl's future son-in-low, was fabulous and did a great job supporting the "big three" in this movie.  Turns out he's a regular on the Office, so now I've convinced Sarahmac we should netflix it.  w00t
• It's interesting to note that Steve Martin acting as if he's high is identical to pretty much every video of Steve Martin from the 70's.  At some point he learned how to act reserved, and now he basically has two modes.