Tag: review

Movie: A Real Pain

pilgrimage

My wife and I recently went to a Friday matinee of the movie A Real Pain at Albany’s Spectrum 8 Theatre.  Here’s a description from a positive review in the New York Times. “Jesse Eisenberg races straight into life’s stubborn untidiness in…a finely tuned, melancholic and at times startlingly funny exploration of loss and belonging that he wrote and directed. He plays David, a fidgety, outwardly ordinary guy who, with his very complicated cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), sets off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust because of ‘a thousand miracles,’ as David puts it, and they’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora.”

Benji points out that David was more emotional as a kid, in a way only family can hone in on. Still, David is a relatively successful businessperson with a wife and a kid.  The cousins have drifted away, yet they still care quite a bit about each other.

While he can be maddening, Benji has a “frenetic exuberance that draws people to him when it doesn’t overwhelm them.” Among them are the British tour guide James (Will Sharpe), Marcia (Jennifer Grey), the sad yet perky newly divorced, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism, and Diane and Mark (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), an older bourgeois Jewish couple.

I believed in the pain these people, especially the leads, felt. A reference to Binghamton made me laugh.
OTOH

The Rotten Tomatoes critics were 96% positive, but the audience was only 80%. An audience poll showed that about half of the 235 responses gave it a five out of five rating. However, about a third of them gave it but one star.

Here’s one example: “The plot is non-existent; it is just some random events that do not tell any story in particular. Characters are flat, with no development whatsoever. The two mismatched cousins are just as flat, inadequate, and unrealistic at the end as they were at the beginning. They didn’t go through any personal challenges or transformation. Just had a fun trip to Poland to goof around the war monuments.” It wasn’t the movie I saw, but many people HATED it.

Two last things. David Oreskes is one of those actors who some used to refer to as “Oh, THAT guy.” He’s been in many things I’ve seen, though I could not have placed any of them.

The other weird thing is that four people remained seated after the movie ended and the lights came up. A  young man in his 20s or maybe 30s explained the story they had just seen. He started, “The story was about these two brothers…” I wanted to interrupt to say they were cousins. Very odd.

Movie review: Anora

not Pretty Woman

I went to see the new movie Anora, largely because it had been so widely acclaimed.  Sean Baker won the Palme d’Or, awarded to the director of the Best Feature Film at the Cannes Film Festival; he also wrote the story. The film was nominated for several other awards. I saw it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, one of only two people present on an early Wednesday matinee.

Fandango describes it as “an audacious, thrilling, and comedic variation on a modern-day Cinderella story.”  Ani (Mikey Madison) is a young sex worker from Brooklyn who is good at her job.  One of her clients is a young, brash, fairly obnoxious, but very rich young man of Russian heritage named Ivan or  Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), who specifically asked for an escort who at least understood Russian. Anora’s grandmother had never learned how to speak English.

They are having a good time, in a wretched excess way, with him shelling out beaucoup bucks for her exclusive company, and in short order, they decide to get married. This is a problem for Vanya’s handlers when they find out. They worked for his parents and were supposed to keep him on a loose leash.  Now, the marriage must annulled, which is complicated.

Evolution

The early part of the film was a bit boring to me. There’s a lot of sex, not just with Ani, and it’s very unsexy. 

The film finally starts getting interesting when two of Vanya’s handlers rush to the lavish home where he and Ani are staying. These guys are intimidating but not lethally scary. Still, they and their immediate boss are determined to get their way and have the means to grease the legal machinery. At this point, I see Ani’s strength and vulnerability come through. And the film becomes a black comedy.

So I liked the latter half of it, although, as some critics pointed out, “Anora’s outbursts of fury, incessant trash talking, and relentless screaming can wear on the ear.” The Rotten Tomatoes reviews were 96% positive with the critics and 90% with the fans. 

I’m reminded that when the movie Pretty Woman was being made, it started as a “gritty dark comedy about the dehumanizing nature of sex work,” much darker than the frothy tale that Garry Marshall engineered with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere’s characters. This is NOT Pretty Woman. 

Movie review: Conclave

the opposite of faith

The pope is dead. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), as Dean of the College of Cardinals, is tasked with organizing the conclave to select a new pontiff. That’s the premise of the movie.

The candidates emerge. Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) is a liberal favorite, while Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellito) is a conservative alternative. Could Cardinal Trembley (John Lithgow) emerge as a compromise? And there’s never been an African pope—how about Cardinal Adeyemi ( Lucian Msamati)? And there are others.

A potential scandal or two colors the proceedings. On the face of it, this should be a boring, stuffy process based on issues that people not seeped in Catholicism would not care about. It is not. The wardrobe and set look realistic, and the cinematography is lovely. “Costume Designer Lisy Christl on Why the Cardinals’ Crosses Were an Important Character Detail.”

The acting—including by Isabella Rosellini as Sister Agnes—is wonderful. The nuns may be invisible, but they do see. Even cardinals struggle with the notion of their calling. One of the resonating quotes is that “the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.”  What are the perils of ambition?

A review I saw notes that Conclave is “among other things, an actual thriller, of character rather than jeopardy.” Well, maybe a little bit of jeopardy. It was surprisingly riveting.

Smoky back rooms

It reminded me somewhat of political conventions, not the ones we have more recently where the outcomes are preordained, but the old-fashioned smoky back rooms, where there was horse trading for votes amongst the delegates. The favorite sons from a given state held their delegates in abeyance for some trade-off.

I saw Conclave at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on a Thursday afternoon. The room was about 1/3 full, which is not bad for that time of day. The reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were 91% positive with the critics and 85% positive with the audiences.

One of the negative reviews was from Hosea Rupprecht from Pauline Media Studies, who wrote: “From the perspective of the Catholic Church, Conclave offends by taking this sacred ritual which is supposed to inspire faith, humility, and trust in the providence of God, and turns it into a disturbing commentary on human weakness and ambition.”

I’m not feeling it. As a Protestant kid who’s had an utter fascination with the papacy from childhood, I think it reflects what people of faith have told me over the many decades about internal struggle.  Others complain about the “final twist that is, arguably, one twist too far.”It’s a fictional story, but the conclusion seems internally consistent.

I highly recommend it.

Movie: The Big Parade (1925)

World War I film

In the past decade, I’ve become very interested in films about World War I. Cole Haddon, on his Substack page, declares that “‘The Big Parade’ is one of the first great anti-war films in cinema, but also a perfect demonstration of what he calls ‘narrative mirroring’ in storytelling.”

The movie was directed by King Vidor in 1925. It’s, of course, a silent film and is black and white. It starts in many ways, like other WWI films I’ve watched, such as the 2018 Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old and the 2022 remake of All Quiet On The Western Front, showing a certain glorification of war. This is the Good Fight. Isn’t it going to be wonderful? Once you get down to the brass tacks—not until the last 60 minutes of this 2.5-hour film—does the fighting become the brutalizing event that war is.

Some of the earlier scenes with Jim (John Gilbert), his army buddies Bull (Tom O’Brien), and the expert spitter Slim (Karl Dane) are on the verge of slapstick. There’s a bit of romance involving Jim’s fiancee, Justyn (Claire Adams), and a young French woman Melisande (Renée Adorée). 

Big hit

Haddon writes that The Big Parade, a title with multiple meanings, was “MGM’s biggest moneymaker until Gone with the Wind was released in 1939. The reason I think it’s worth your time to consider what I have to say about it is twofold: 1) the film has been beautifully restored and is available to watch for free on YouTube (link)  and, more importantly, 2) the structure Vidor and his team of writers used.”

He notes: “Narrative mirroring involves repeating a story beat in a different context, an act of juxtaposition with the first that produces a new, deeper meaning…This repeated beat also tends to imbue similarly new, deeper meaning in the original story beat if/when the viewer returns to it. This happens consistently throughout The Big Parade.”

My fascination with WWI films is because, like most people, I understand World War I far less than the American Civil War or World War II.

Today is 11/11, the anniversary of the “war to end all wars,” which it didn’t.

Movie review: The Wild Robot

say important things

Based on good word-of-mouth, I attended a Tuesday afternoon matinee showing of the animated film The Wild Robot at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

I didn’t know it was based on a children’s book until I saw the movie. The story begins with robots that are shipwrecked on the shore. One robot is stymied by the fact that our heroine has no people to serve.

(Hmm. Can robots HAVE gender? This and many other questions are addressed in author Peter Brown’s reflections on the writing of this book.)

Initially, Roz (voiced by  Lupita Nyong’o) confounds or terrifies the wildlife she sees. When she figures out the language of the woodland creatures, she, to her surprise, is not welcome. She inadvertently ends up parenting an orphaned baby goose, Brightbill (Kit Connor), assisted by a conflicted fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal).

I loved this movie. First, the DreamWorks film looks marvelous. But more importantly, it has a compelling storyline about making one’s way in a strange land. Some have compared it favorably with the movies E.T., the Iron Giant, and WALL-E, and I suppose there are hints of those.

“stunning visual feast but also a moving meditation”

However, I found it more reflective and deep about the complexities of life, yet it is still accessible to children. Several reviews (97% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) glommed onto the complexities of being a parent. Yet, at times, it was hysterically LOL funny.

Leonard Maltin wrote: “The Wild Robot is a genuinely beautiful movie, in every sense of that adjective. Its physical production is impressive, to say the least, but there are no weak links in its chain, from character design to its exquisitely rendered environment.”  Other critics used terms such as “unexpected emotional rollercoaster, “and “a moving meditation on life, friendship, and survival in an unforgiving environment,”

Some reviewers were even more taken by it. Courtney Lanning of Arkansas Public Radio wrote: “Everyone who watches ‘The Wild Robot’ can come away connecting with something, whether it’s an urge to help others, even if they’ve hurt you in the past, or learning to say important things to loved ones because you never know when it’ll be too late.” Hmm. She’s not wrong.

Right before the film, I attended a book review of The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli, reviewed by Lex Bhagat, former Executive Director of FFAPL, and currently a business librarian at NY SBDC, where I used to work. Two days later, I saw an episode of Law & Order: The founder of an AI-infused dating app is murdered. These got me thinking again about the nature of technology and how “real” Roz was. No answers, just musings.

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