Tag: movies

MOVIE REVIEW: Selma

Selma’s Bloody Sunday took place on my 12th birthday.

selmamovieIt seemed like the obvious thing to do. The Wife and I went to see the movie Selma on the Martin Luther King holiday, which also celebrates Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Arkansas Mississippi, and, notably, Alabama.

While The Wife dropped off the Daughter at the sitter’s, I waited for her, and for the massive crowd to see this film. And there was a stream of people coming in the Spectrum Theatre, to see… American Sniper, which, to be fair, had just opened, while Selma had opened the week before. Still, our theater was about 85% full.

You must understand that I recall these events extremely well. Bloody Sunday took place on my 12th birthday. I remember Andrew Young, Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, and others. I surely remember Sheriff Clark. When a guy named James Reeb comes on the screen, I say to myself, “He was a Unitarian minister from Boston.”

So here’s my review: it was great. Director Ava DuVernay was visionary in recreating the feel and look of the period. David Oyelowo didn’t so much look or sound like Martin Luther King Jr., as embodied his essence. The same can be said for Carmen Ejogo as
Coretta Scott King.

But I was having trouble writing this review, not because I didn’t know how I felt about the movie, but rather because I didn’t know what to make of the “controversy” around it. Specifically, it had to do with the role of President Lyndon B. Johnson, played extremely well by Tom Wilkinson. Even before we saw the film, an in-law had mentioned that “Selma, the film, is not exactly true.” After seeing the movie, all I can say is: claptrap.

It’s not that Selma should be impervious to being critiqued. It’s only that the criticism, which the ‘Selma’ director responded to, seems disproportionate to the total picture. Folks who well know the Alan Turing story found The Imitation Game enjoyable, even while recognizing that it’s far different than the actual events. Walt Disney didn’t actually go to London to pursue the “Mary Poppins” author, as it was portrayed in Saving Mr. Banks.

In the case of the film Selma, I believe not everything was factual – the reference to the Birmingham church bombing was in 1963, not as chronologically close to the 1965 Selma story as it might have appeared. But it showed a greater truth about a people being terrorized by racism.

Bill Moyers, who I admire greatly, thought the film was wrong in suggesting that LBJ was behind J. Edgar Hoover’s sending the “sex tape” to Coretta King. I had a chance to talk with a film critic, and we both thought the movie was far more ambiguous than that.

These two articles pretty much reflect my sentiment: It’s Critics of ‘Selma’ Who Are Distorting Civil Rights History and What’s really behind the “Selma” backlash.

I didn’t agree with this section of the article from Slate: “The film’s running time is a swift two hours; I wouldn’t have minded an extra 30 minutes to learn more about the rest of the civil rights pioneers (all real historical figures) who march arm-in-arm on the front lines with King.” The film, as it says at the end, is not a documentary. There are plenty of them already about this era.

This was an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, especially considering the movie doesn’t use the actual words from MLK’s speeches, for copyright reasons.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Imitation Game

The film The Imitation Game flashes back to Alan Turing’s childhood prep school.

2014, THE IMITATION GAMEIf it weren’t for Alan Turing, you might not be reading this or much else on the Internet. He “was an English mathematician, wartime code-breaker and pioneer of computer science.”

But he was pretty much just a name to me until my friend Mary and I went to see The Imitation Game last week, as usual at The Spectrum in Albany. It was a story about how Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and fellow mathematicians (including Matthew Goode, from the TV show The Good Wife, as Hugh Alexander) try to crack the enigma code that the Germans were using to transmit their movements.

The code was thought to be unbreakable because the number of calculations needed to suss it out was far greater than the human mind could tally in hundreds of years. But, Turing wondered, what would happen if one could devise a MACHINE to figure out what another machine was doing?

This was a difficult sell, in part because Turing was awkward, and, understandably, arrogantly confident in his talents. He was not a “people person.” When he finagles some control of the project, he uses a crossword puzzle to recruit a couple more people, including a young woman (Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke).

The film flashes back to Turing’s childhood prep school, where he was bullied and had but one very good friend. It also jumps forward, where the police, investigating a break-in at Turing’s house, discover secrets about his past and present life, including his homosexuality, which was a crime in 1950s Britain.

Despite his current popularity – type in BEN in IMBD, and Benedict Cumberbatch is the first name to pop up – I had only seen the lead actor in one other role, a small but important part in August: Osage County; he was quite good.

Here he carries the film, though Knightly and the other actors are also very good. The film uses some stock war footage, and, interestingly to me, it doesn’t look as obviously different as in some films I’ve seen.

The negative reviews – they were 90% positive on Rotten Tomatoes – chide the movie for taking Turing and making him less interesting, less nuanced than he should have been portrayed. Moreover, the screen overlay coda of his ultimate fate was considered a bit of a cheat. Since I knew only the name, I can’t speak to the former. The latter argument has some validity, I suppose, but a late scene in the movie does explain the situation to my satisfaction.

Bottom line: I watched what was on the screen, without the background on Turing, and found myself quite entertained and informed.

MOVIE REVIEW: Big Eyes

I’m so glad I saw Big Eyes before Amy Adams won the Golden Globe as best Lead Actress in a Motion Picture- Comedy or Musical.

bigeyesThe movie Big Eyes could have been called Big Lie, for that’s what Walter and Margaret Keane shared. The paintings of children with eyes disproportionally huge peepers were painted by Margaret (Amy Adams), but Walter (Christoph Waltz) was superior at schmoozing and promoting; surely him taking credit for her paintings would be OK, wouldn’t it? He liked telling the story of his time painting in Paris, so he could chat up the press about his wife’s art, even if he claimed them as his own.

I’ve been fascinated by the effect of the lie, especially since I read the book Lying by Sissela Bok some years ago. Either the lie eats away at you, or it overtakes you, as the lie becomes the new reality. That’s what happens in Big Eyes.

I’m so glad I saw this movie before Amy Adams won the Golden Globe as Best Lead Actress in a Motion Picture- Comedy or Musical. I really liked the performance, but it’s subtle. Anyone expecting scene-chewing will be disappointed.

Big Eyes is a comedy or musical? Music DOES play a part in that the Cal Tjader group is playing at the hungry i nightclub where Walter initially hawks the paintings. Vince Guaraldi, the pianist/composer most associated with the Charlie Brown music, played with Tjader’s group for a time.

The real situation comedy comes at the end, in the courtroom scene, though the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair narrative was darkly funny, I suppose, with Terence Stamp as a New York City art critic; now HE can chew scenery.

I’ve seen Amy Adams in about a dozen films, from The Muppets to American Hustle. But I’d never seen Christoph Waltz, even though he was also in a Muppets film, plus more serious fare, such as Django Unchained. He’s very good here as, initially, a very sweet and charming guy.

Some guy in my row in the theater said afterward, “That was a Tim Burton film?” It wasn’t particularly Burtonesque, except for one scene, teased in the trailer. This is not a BIG film, telling an epic narrative, but as one critic noted, an “entertaining take on a pop culture footnote.”

One of the negative reviews, by Rick Kisonak, notes: “It suggests Margaret was a browbeaten victim of her husband’s greed while making it clear she was actually a willing participant in the ruse.” I think the critic, and he’s not the only one, missed the point about how subtle manipulation can take place in relationships. He’s also putting post-feminist values in a pre-feminism situation.

Interesting how religion plays a role in Margaret’s narrative, at two different points, to very different results.

Last observation: the story is based on real events. Those paintings of kids with big eyes REALLY creeped me out when I was a child, and they seemed to be EVERYWHERE, part of the real Walter’s marketing genius.

MOVIE REVIEW: Into the Woods

James Corden, who I did not really know, is the breakout star of Into the Woods.

Somehow, I had managed never to have seen any iteration of the popular stage musical Into the Woods, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. despite the fact that it played on Broadway in 1987, and has been produced many times, including “a 1988 US national tour, a 1991 television production, a 1997 tenth anniversary concert, and a 2002 Broadway revival,” among others. The Wife and The Daughter saw a production at the local theater, Steamer No. 10 a couple years back.
into the woods
As for the movie version, which the three of saw at the Spectrum on the first Sunday of 2015:
“The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales and follows them to explore the consequences of the characters’ wishes and quests.” The main characters are taken from stories of:
Little Red Riding Hood – Lilla Crawford (the Annie on Broadway in 2012-2014), with Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean) as the Wolf
Jack and the Beanstalk – Daniel Huttlestone (the movie Les Misérables), with Tracey Ullman as Jack’s mother
Rapunzel – Mackenzie Mauzy, with Billy Magnussen as her prince
Cinderella – Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), with Christine Baranski (TV’s The Good Wife, the movie Chicago) as her stepmother, Tammy Blanchard, and Lucy Punch as her stepsisters, and Chris Pine (new Star Trek movies) as her prince

There’s a framing story involving a baker (James Corden, who’ll be replacing Craig Ferguson on a late-night talk show), his wife (Emily Blunt from The Devil Wears Prada) with Meryl Streep (also The Devil Wears Prada, now that I think of it, and a whole lot more) as the witch who has a curse on the couple. They need to gather items associated with the other four stories.

It’s all good fun. The singing is strong. Corden, who I did not really know, is the breakout star. Pine and Magnussen have a duet, Agony, that is just a hoot. The Baker’s Wife is perhaps the key character, and Blunt is strong here. Many observers, including the Wife, thought that Red Riding Hood was annoying and the Wolf creepy, but I thought that was what they were supposed to be. Jack is much more likable, and he’s a thief.

They mostly live happily ever after, and apparently, that’s how Act 1 of the musical ends. I heard this story of the out-of-town tryouts for the theatrical production, with composer Stephen Sondheim literally running out to the parking lot telling patrons that the show was not over.

Act 2 is somewhat darker. This is epitomized in a terrific song called “Your Fault”, which I HAVE seen performed on TV – perhaps on the Tonys some years back? I understand a movie is necessarily truncated from its source material. Since it’s a Disney movie – and marketed so heavily on its channels that the Daughter wanted to see the film more than I – thematic elements have been removed. Obviously, I can’t comment on what I’d not seen, but the solution as presented worked for me. And while it had “some suggestive material,” the Daughter was fine with it all.

In other words, I liked it quite a bit, though it dragged, briefly, in places. Interesting that at Rotten Tomatoes, the audience liked it less than the critics. Some, I imagine, are Sondheim purists. Critic Leonard Maltin says that this movie adaptation of a Broadway show actually IMPROVED on the original.

Let’s face it, you either buy into the notion of people breaking into song on a regular basis, or you don’t. Somehow it flowed very well here, perhaps in part because there was the narration, by the Baker, to break it up. Also, it was so fantasy-laden, the singing seemed less jarring than, say, in Sondheim’s West Side Story – which I love – but which is more based in reality.

Pictures: top, l-r, Kendrick, Corden, Streep, Huttlestone, Ullman, Mauzy; bottom, l-r, Pine, Blunt, Depp, Crawford, Baranski, Magnussen.

MOVIE REVIEW: Interstellar

In Interstellar, reading the dust, literally, Coop makes a startling discovery and eventually flies off into a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum.

interstellarNow THAT’S how I like to see a movie: knowing almost nothing. I’d heard Interstellar had gotten some decent reviews and that it ran almost three hours (actually 166 minutes).

In Albany, it was playing both at the Spectrum, only at noon, and at my neighborhood Madison Theatre, at 3, 6 and 9:35 p.m., on the last Tuesday of 2014. If you knew my spouse, you’d know the latter was totally off the table, even though she didn’t have to work the next day.

The Madison at 6 it is. They show no previews, so the patrons haven’t figured out that when the overlay comes on that says the title, it’s time to be quiet.

There’s Matthew Matthew McConaughey playing Coop, a farmer in a near-future United States which is about to experience some nasty combination of the Ireland potato famine of the 1840s, as crop after crop fails; and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with precautions against the dust a way of life.

Coop is widowed with a couple kids, easy-going 15-year-old Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), an intense, intelligent 10-year-old girl. The kids have limited prospects, limited dreams in the new economy, epitomized by one sentence from Coop: “We used to look up to the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

In the early part of the film, the most chilling dialogue takes place between Coop and a pair of “educators” (David Oyelowo, Collette Wolfe) who have criticized Coop for letting Murph read unauthorized books rather than the revisionist history.

Reading the dust, literally, Coop makes a startling discovery, after which he leaves his two kids in the care of his father-in-law (John Lithgow) and eventually flies off into a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum with Brand (Anne Hathaway) – daughter of a noted scientist (Michael Caine) – and with others in a desperate effort to save the earth’s inhabitants.

It goes on like that, space travel, with much talk about time and gravity and how it affects all the other dimensions, and some occasional action, both in space and on the home front.

Interstellar also stars Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, and a whole lot of other folks, with essentially a cameo by Ellen Burstyn.

Then I realized I have no idea how to review this movie, at least without a lot of spoilers. So I am going to cheat and paste reviewers’ observations:

*As a singular movie-watching opportunity, it’s undoubtedly worthwhile. – Christy Lemire (negative review)

*Having set out to be a journey into what can hardly be depicted at all, Interstellar must find oblique ways of suggesting further imperceptible dimensions of the real. It is worth the journey to see what [director and co-writer Christopher] Nolan has constructed as a model of the unknowable. – Geoffrey O’Brien (positive review)

*A combination of spectacular special effects, marginal physics, and grindingly slow treacle. – Ron Wilkinson (positive review)

*Interstellar may be a preposterous epic, but it is an epic nonetheless. – Christopher Orr (positive review)

These are all accurate assessments of my feelings. I will say that Jessica Chastain as the grown-up Murph is very good. I thought the third hour was better paced, and more interesting, than the second, which could have used a 10-minute edit.

Bottom line: I’m glad I saw it, I wouldn’t watch it again, and I’m unsure whether to recommend it. The Wife liked it much less than I, but she was more confused by the science, or pseudo-science, while I didn’t worry greatly about the details.

I do think this will look worse on home video because the viewer will quite possibly get bored and give up on it.

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