Tag: review

Movie review: A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan

My wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see A Complete Unknown at a Saturday matinee in late December. I asked the cashier whether people approached them and sang the title. They said a few did because they were trying to remember the film’s name; rather than saying, “Oh, the Dylan film,” they dug up the line from Like a Rolling Stone. The theater was quite full, with most patrons appearing to be eligible for Social Security.

It isn’t easy to analyze the film without the big caveats that many have already shared about the chronology and veracity of what happened to Bob Dylan between 1961 and 1965.  Characters are combined, and events happen in different order. What DID Pete Seeger feel about Dylan “going electric”? (Pete has long suggested that the distorted sound, not the volume, bothered him.)

All I can do is evaluate the film I saw. I liked it quite a bit, and my wife, who is a bit younger than me and not as immersed in early 1960s folk/pop music culture, also enjoyed it.

Timothée Chalamet did a credible job as Dylan or an element of Dylan. The movie’s Dylan seems to have been consistently oblique about his upbringing. His first girlfriend in New York City, Sylvie (Elle Fanning), complained that he’d never discussed it. Dylan pointed out that we’re all reinventing ourselves. 

So it was with the real Bob, from his white face paint in the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 to his religious era in the late 1970s and beyond.

Edward Norton did a wonderful job as Pete Seeger. Boyd Harrison was an adequate Johnny Cash, more with the swagger than the voice. Monica Barbaro was a pretty good Joan Baez; I think, in some ways, she had the hardest job of all since, to my ear, Joan’s is wonderfully specific.

A fan

I’m a big fan of these artists. I have a lot of Dylan, as well as several albums of Dylan covers, including this one. To be honest, seeing him in 2008 was rather unsatisfying.

Joan’s Best of Joan Baez album on Vanguard in the early ’60s was pivotal in my understanding of folk music. My father, sister Leslie, and I sag So Soon In The Morning from that album.  I saw her sing at the 1998 Newport Folk Festival. Recommend: the documentary I Am A Noise. About A Complete Unknown, she said that she didn’t have to see the film: “I lived it.”

My father owned the Pete Seeger album We Shall Overcome, Live from Carnegie Hall (1963). It got played a lot and had a huge effect on my father. I saw Pete sing in person probably three dozen times, mostly in the Mid-Hudson. One day, he performed at anti-war rallies in New Paltz and Kingston, NY.  I even spoke to him once at an anti-Springboks demonstration in September 1981 in Albany.

While I watched his ABC TV shows in the 1960s and 1970s, I rediscovered Johnny Cash in the mid-1990s through his American Recordings.

Movie review- Mufasa: The Lion King

Very leontine

I’m seeped in the Lion King mythos, so that’s why my wife, daughter, and I saw the Mufasa movie at the Spectrum Theatre in mid-January. My wife and I saw the original 1994 animated film, as did our daughter subsequently. The musical production at Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady my wife and I saw twice, once with our daughter.  The daughter was in the production at church. I saw a junior high school production, and I suspect there’s another. But I didn’t see the live action film from 2019.

The reviews  for Mufasa have been mixed, only 56% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. A postive review: “A remake of ‘The Lion King’ was an unnecessary move from a cinematic point of view, but a masterstroke from a business point of view.”

A couple negative takes: It “would have been perfect if its characters had fewer lines, and if the songs were in the background rather than emerging through the mouths of clearly computer-generated figures.” “The songs fall flat, the story is basic, and the movie falls for all of the prequel tropes we’ve grown tired of.”

Profitable

I agree with all of that. It is Disney money grab, for sure, and a successful one at that. While the animals were rendered wonderfully, it was a bit difficult to distinguish some of them, particularly the lions.

Watching them sing was a bit distracting. Some of the songs were particularly cutesy. Although I had forgotten he was involved, a few,  in particular Bye Bye immediately sounded like Lin Manuel Miranda’s signature style, even though I had forgotten that he was involved with the film. Interestingly, listening to them without watching the action was less distracting.

We were surprised that the film suggested, albeit off screen,  incredible violence, as the vultures head towards what had to have been a killing field.

But I think the film got better as the film centers on five characters, three lions and two others. There was an interesting lesson at the end which I suspect some people will think is a bit too “woke” for their taste, but which I thought was true. By the end of the movie, I’d given into the storyline.

 I got enough out of it that it wasn’t a waste my time, but your experience may differ.

Movie review: Wicked

Ozian authoritarianism

For my wife’s and my Tuesday date night in mid-December, we went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see the movie Wicked. I had seen the touring show of the Broadway play a dozen years earlier and liked it quite a bit. I also read the book and was not as enthusiastic about it.

However, the novel is important as it creates a reimagining of the L. Frank Baum books, with a certain amount of homage to the 1939 movie. The character we knew as the Wicked Witch of the West has been named Elphaba, a direct homage to Baum’s initials. That the protagonist is not inherently evil is an interesting concept. 

The movie leans into both the book and the Broadway show. As described by Alex Mell-Taylor here: “The book chronicles her life as she struggles against the authoritarian Wizard of Oz, a fascistic figure who scapegoats entire classes of people to stay in power, including, eventually, Elphaba herself.

“It’s ultimately a tragic tale about how the winners of history can turn fighters for justice into villains.

“The musical never abandoned this theme, but it does become less prominent, with the emotional core switching to Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship and the rise of Ozian authoritarianism becoming more of a B-plot. While Maguire’s original retelling had some flashy, risque elements, it’s undoubtedly more substantive than the musical. A large part of the book is about Elphaba’s activism — something the musical only briefly touches upon.

This AND That

“The movie is a hybrid of these two visions. It follows the structure of the musical but uses visuals to heighten the authoritarian (arguably fascist) aesthetic that first came from the book. We are aware of Ozian’s discriminatory nature throughout the film in a way that feels much more consequential than a simple B-plot.”

This explains, if not necessarily justifies, the movie’s length—or, more correctly, the movies. Wicked: For Good will be released in November 2025.  

I liked the first movie well enough. As enemies turned friends, Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Ariana Grande-Butera (Galinda) gave strong performances. Jeff Goldblum, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Michelle Yeoh, as Madame Morrible, and Jonathan Bailey, as the eye candy Fiyero, were also very good. 

Still, the movie’s length wore me down. Somebody (Roger Ebert?) suggested that a movie could be too long at 90 minutes and too short at 4 hours. This movie, which was about 2:45, had many elements that I enjoyed, including most of the music, but somehow, I was a little disappointed.

The movie received an 88% positive critics’ rating and 95% from audiences.  As Keith Garlingrton noted: “’Wicked’ doesn’t quite dazzle the way it wants to. It’s an uneven and unwieldy production.” It felt like an oversized truck careening down a narrow highway when you worry that the payload will tip over.

Then there’s the “you have to see the next episode” aspect. I experienced this with Marvel movies, so I and many others were not rushing to see the later outings after Avengers: Endgame. I will probably see Wicked For Good, but it will make me cranky. 

A few articles

‘Wicked’ and Hollywood’s Bumpy Road to Oz. Jon M. Chu’s musical… is defying gravity at the box office — but it was a winding yellow-brick road of Hollywood adaptations to get here from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

‘Wicked’ Easter Eggs for Your Second (or Third) Watch. Two of the elements were obvious to me. “The title card for Wicked also uses the same font as the title card for The Wizard of Oz... Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the roles of Elphaba and Glinda, respectively, in the Wicked Broadway stage musical,” have a number.

Shawn Levy (Deadpool & Wolverine) and Jon M. Chu (Wicked) — Directors on Directors

Cynthia Erivo Reveals She Co-Wrote an Original Song for Elphaba in ‘Wicked: For Good.’  ‘Wicked: For Good’: Here’s What We Know About Part 2.

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. 

Ramblin' with Roger
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