Tag: movies

Movie review: Janet Planet

the Berkshires

After seeing a rather endearing trailer, my wife and I went to the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany to see the movie Janet Planet on a Tuesday evening.

It’s weird. After we shared our impressions afterward, we pointed out some interesting things about what the movie set out to do in depicting a single mom (the title character played by Juliana Nicholson) and her tween daughter Lacy (Zoey Ziegler) in 1991.

Yet, seeing the film in real-time, the revelations unfolded too slowly and possibly obliquely for our taste.

Early during the movie, an older gentleman in the audience pulled out his phone. I thought it strange until I realized that he was turning up his hearing aid. The first section, the one featuring Janet’s brusque boyfriend Wayne  (Will Patton), was almost all long shots and difficult to hear.

The next section involved the troupe of performers, which was interesting enough, as Janet reconnects with old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo). This section is at least slightly more interesting. The third act involves that group – is it a cult? – Guru, Avi  (Elias Koteas).

Lacy, meanwhile, is largely observing her mother’s life, making sometimes pointed comments. But mostly, she is alone in her thoughts except for her increasingly interesting doll house characters. She has no friends except, briefly, one. Her piano lessons seem a chore for both the student and her instructor.

Reviews

The Rotten Tomatoes critics’ reviews were 84% positive. One compared it favorably with the mother/daughter piece Lady Bird. I LIKED Lady Bird.

One negative review by Rich Cline reflected our thoughts: “The mannered approach means that story only comes to life in brief spurts of insight, especially as the excellent cast adds details to characters who are somewhat undefined. But much of the film involves watching nothing happen at all.”

I generally agreed with the audience reviews, which were only 40% positive. While I don’t think it was “pointless” or “the worst film in decades,” which I read more than once, “this is a very, very slow film in which little happens. If the characters were the least bit engaging, this might have worked.”

I was bored and impatient, and my wife wished she had not gone.

It does have some nice western Massachusetts scenery, which we were familiar with. The story is by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker. It supposedly “captures a child’s experience of time passing, and the ineffability of a daughter falling out of love with her mother, in this singularly sublime film debut.”

It just didn’t work for us.

Also, the title kept reminding me of Van Morrison’s first wife. 

Movie review: Daddio

two people in a taxi

The movie Daddio is about two people driving around and talking. More specifically, a young woman (Dakota Johnson) arrives at the airport and gets into the back seat of a yellow taxi. The cab driver (Sean Penn) heads towards Manhattan, and they talk. That’s pretty much it.

The cabbie, Clark, or whoever he wanted to be, is a fairly astute judge of people. As he generates conversation with his last fare of the night, she’s willing to put away her cell phone for a few moments in response. They discuss the nature of romantic relationships, sometimes as a competition.

The critics like it, 77% positive, and the audience response is 86% thumbs up. wrote: “The pair’s conversation only grows in unexpected specificity and fiery intensity from there… While I never fully bought that the two characters would engage as intimately as they do, their conversation still kept me glued to my seat…” While I agree with the latter half, I found strangers in a taxi talking entirely credible. When I used to take the train to Charlotte, NC, and elsewhere regularly, I was initially shocked at what total strangers would share with me.

The cabbie’s motives

Fetters also notes: “Is Clark attracted to her? Does he look at the woman as a daughter? Is he bored and just happy to have someone in his cab willing to chat with him? As for her, does she need this conversation right now? Does Clark spark something inside her that makes her willing to open up to a complete stranger about so many ins and outs happening in her life at the moment?”

But Rex Reed’s negative assessment is NOT wrong. “Every woman I’ve ever known would start looking for an escape from a cabbie who turns as embarrassingly intimate as this one does.” 

This is Christy Hall’s directorial debut and also her first script for the cinema. Dakota Johnson was an executive producer.

In some ways, I wondered how this would play out as a two-person play. It would require something to display what she is surreptitiously texting.  

I think it is a good but not great film. My wife and I saw it on a Tuesday night at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. 

Movie review: Thelma

families are complicated

My wife and I saw the new movie Thelma at the Spectrum  8 Theatre in Albany on a Thursday afternoon. This is the first starring role for nonagenarian Jane Squibb, who I first remember seeing in the 2013 film Nebraska, for which she was rightly nominated for an Oscar.

The story was written by director Josh Margolin, who based the story on his own mother, also named Thelma. IRL, some folks tried to scam Margolin’s mom with a fake call from her “grandson” who was in “trouble,” but she didn’t fall for it.

The cinematic Thelma adores her 24-year-old grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger), and the feeling is mutual, as he gives her help with her computer, and she offers him confidence. A phony telephone ploy takes her in. Once she realizes that Daniel is all right, she plans to get her money back.

This is complicated by Daniel’s parents, Thelma’s daughter Gail (Parker Posey), and Alan (Clark Gregg, who you may recognize from oodles of Marvel movies). They believe the older woman is experiencing cognitive decline since being widowed a couple of years earlier and may need to move into assisted living.

Our protagonist is having none of this. She borrows a vehicle from her old friend Ben (the late Richard Roundtree), who somewhat reluctantly comes along for the adventure.

Review

There were only ten people in the theater, none of them under 50, I surmise. There were laugh-out-loud segments, and not just by my measure.  One particular action cliche is particularly funny.

A lot of truth is here about listening to what older people say, especially about their own lives. Daniel’s parents learn things about their son’s skill set.

Josh Margolis has already won some minor awards, including at the Desertscape International Film Festival, where he was the 2024 festival award winner for Best Action Movie. Seriously.

Professional reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes were 99% positive. Kylie Bolter of the Chicago notes: “This action-comedy leaves room for plenty of nuance about aging and autonomy.” The audience score was 83% positive, with the most common complaint being that it was “boring.” No. Just no.

Movie review: Inside Out 2

perceptive

For Father’s Day, my wife, daughter, and I went to a matinee of the new Pixar film Inside Out 2 at the Spectrum Theatre. This marks one of the few times I’ve gone to a movie on the opening weekend. My family saw the original film in 2015 and I was a big fan. 

Things are going swimmingly for the now-13-year-old Riley, who is playing hockey with her two besties. Then they attend a specialized camp at the same time she hits PUBERTY. Her existing emotions don’t realize the significance until Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Paul Walter Hauser (Embarrassment), and especially Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrive, turning the OG emotions’ well-oiled machine upside down. 

I enjoyed it a lot. Moreover, only recently having been the parent of a teenager, it rang true. It was also quite funny, especially the appearance of a fifth emotion, and two other characters who show up.

More than that, I note that Pixar took great care in getting the emotions correct by using consultants in the field. From TIME: “Dr. Dacher Keltner is a Stanford grad, Berkeley professor, and co-director of the Greater Good Science Centre, with a sweet side gig as part of the Inside Out consulting team, alongside psychologists Paul Ekman and Lisa Damour.”

Reviews

The critics, who were 91% positive, tended to complain that it wasn’t as good as the original. In this camp are a few who thought it was too much of an educational endeavor. I think that was precisely the point, helping teens and their parents negotiate new terrain without being preachy.

I get the feeling that some of these folks have forgotten how difficult puberty is, and it’s certainly more so than when they (and I) were growing up. Sequels are more difficult beasts, but I thought it was very impressive.

This piece from Variety is spot on. “‘Inside Out 2’ is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that is, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit…, it may also be the most perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since ‘Eighth Grade,’” another movie I enjoyed.

“The film isn’t always as uproariously funny as the first ‘Inside Out,’ because it lacks that primal surprise factor. Yet it’s full of moments of delicious effrontery. “

Recommended. And it did boffo box office.

Rebel Without A Cause; SIX

Divorced, beheaded, survived

I haven’t attended enough cultural/entertainment events for my tastes of late. While I did go to the reopening of the Spectrum Theatre on April 24, I haven’t been able to get there since, and I want to soon.

I saw Rebel Without A Cause, the first James Dean movie I ever viewed.  Experienced with a 21st-century lens, Jim Stark (Dean) seems less a rebel than, in the words of ScreenRant, “a troubled youth struggling to find his place in a society he sees as hypocritical and devoid of meaning.”

Indeed, it is the high school clique that almost immediately scorns him without much provocation who are at least as broken as he. The knife fight between Jim and Buzz (Corey Allen), a few years before West Side Story, is said to reflect the “social pressures of male teenagers.”

Surely, Jim is frustrated by his ineffectual father Frank (Jim Backus), who allows Jim’s mother Carol (Ann Doran) to uproot the family at the first sign of difficulty.

Control

Jim’s one male friend, Plato (Sal Mineo), is a real outsider, abandoned by his parents, needing “to assert some control over a world in which he feels powerless and invisible.”

Jim’s classmate Judy (Natalie Wood, later in West Side Story) evolves from her disregard for Jim as her classmates did, while missing her old relationship with her father (William Hopper from Perry Mason), to Jim and Judy becoming surrogate parents to Plato.

Indie Wire makes the case that Plato is the first gay teenager on film while avoiding getting stopped by the restrictive Hays Code

It’s an interesting slice of life, with Ray (Edward Platt from Get Smart), the cop specializing in dealing with youth a sympathetic character. Even if it is “overwrought and cloyingly melodramatic,” I still appreciated the chance to see it on the big screen.

Famously, the three leads all died too soon. In a gallery of Lost Photos From a Legendary Hollywood Archive, Dean is captured just a month before he died in a car crash at the age of 24 on 9/30/55, even before the film premiered. Natalie Wood drowned at sea in 1981 at the age of 43. And Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976 at the age of 37.

Divorced, beheaded, died…

SIX, which my wife, daughter, and I saw at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady I don’t think is that compelling a book. I had listened to the music beforehand. But for what it is, it does the thing extremely well. It was an 80-minute rock show with a sextet of Henry VIII’s queens.

The Times Union review by Katherine Kiess is about right. “Styled as a ‘Renaissance Idol’ belt-off…they compete in a glamor-coated trauma Olympics to see whose marriage was the worst.”

You can tell it was a rock show because they namechecked “Schenectady!” a half dozen times before the “LED wall panels and cathedral windows that become everything from a church confessional to a dating app screen.”

The four-piece band, the Ladies In Waiting, cooked.  And the singers were excellent. So it’s perhaps not great theater but, as the Los Angeles Times noted, it is “unapologetically revisionist. That’s why it’s successful.” And entertaining enough.

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