Reviews

Subtitled "Olivia Colman Goes for the Oscar Again".

It is a very nuanced and persuasive performance - but only half the story belongs to her - the actress who plays her as a younger woman is also powerful and effective - while Dakota Johnson is basically a body and big eyes (it helps your career so much when your daddy is well known in the movie business).

One of Neflix's "must see" but there are issues are:

• Subtext as text. We get hints about important things, but then the images go back to sea and surf - it's like touching a hot stove - they can't focus on the heat - a problem with both the script and the direction.

• Is it a thriller or not? They can't seem to decide.

• The character of Leda is very muddled. Some women should not be mothers? Is that the point? But there are plenty of details that contradict that. And, if it's true that some women are not equipped for the job, what should we do about it? Legislation? Peer pressure? A better system of orphanages?

As a father of two, I get it - kids take everything from you, and there's no guarantee that they'll ever give anything back.

But there's nothing original about that insight.

In conclusion, it's gratifying that a female cast and crew confirm something I've been saying for a long time: when a woman meets someone she perceives as a true Alpha Male she MUST have sex with him - she's helpless - it's in our DNA and it's inevitable, just as it happens here.

Playing the pleasant game of alternative history, we can make a couple of reasonable assumptions.

If Stalin had gotten The Bomb first, would he have used it to achieve global domination? Of course.

And Hitler? He would have leveled London without a second thought.

But the jarring plot point in this narrative is that Joan puts the US in the same category as those guys.

The Yanks took out Hiroshima, and Nagasaki - therefore they have no moral compass whatsoever and poor little Russia must have The Bomb to protect itself.

This is the basic problem with the script: when it comes to science Joan is a very smart cookie.

When it comes to other things - politics, people, sex - she doesn't really seem to know her ass from a hole in the ground.

In her concluding speech she makes the argument that she was right - 50 years of peace proving her decisions - but conveniently fails to mention the epically expensive arms race that resulted.

This is a well-done movie, and certainly worth the time, but the main character - as she's written - is not very convincing and it's reasonable to react to her with a strong sense of impatience.

What gets left out of the description is the 33 minutes at the beginning of the movie where Verhoeven is fawned over by various people as he explains how the script for the film was constructed. The screenwriter wrote only the first 4 pages. The rest pf the narrative arc was crowd-sourced, and - like anything crowd-sourced - it's profoundly mediocre. Crowds don't make great art. Only gifted individuals do. Lots of effort for not much benefit. So, keep in mind: the fictional movie itself is only about an hour long - and there are no surprises - just Paul Verhoeven congratulating himself on being so hip and smart.

A great narrative about male bonding outside the bull***t requirements of "caper" movies like Oceans Eleven. You may find it to be a little unbelievable that this guy has women in his life who look like this - but, as writer-director - you have the option of casting hot women (Woody Allen's been doing it practically his whole career). What is believable: that Jon Favreau is a chef de cuisine, and has almost a religious attachment to food and the part that it plays in the quality of life for many people. Also welcome: his speech (about 38:00) about the necessity of "excellence" in life. If you're going to play, put your whole self into the game. I think this is the kind of speech that every father should be making to his kids. There is absolutely no downside to this movie, and it's still entertaining even after repeated viewing.

Ignoring the whole idea that Dickens wrote to make a point about the cruel society around him. Instead we get this entirely toothless exercise in post-modern self-indulgence. Were Boz alive today he might wonder why someone would go to such lengths to hollow out his work.

A movie which is not about "cafe society". Those acquainted with sports understand that an elite athlete makes the greatest amount of money at the end of his (or her) career - when their skills are at their lowest ebb. Amazon closed a monster production deal with Woody Allen before backing out due to political heat, but that financial windfall was an indicator of how highly regarded he is even when most of us can see how so, so, so tired his material has become. Like an old casserole your favorite aunt pulls out of the back of the frig. Sure, you liked it when you were a kid - but this one is just a bunch of stuff thrown together without rhyme or reason - and every few forkfuls you can taste some mold. The theme (if you can call it that) is one that Allen returns to again and again: romantic indecision. We want something (or someone) until we have it - then don't want it so much - then want it even more when having it seems impossible. It's a recipe for consistent misery and Allen's on record as saying that life itself is mainly miserable and he doesn't understand how most people get through the day. On the other hand, one of the pleasures of this late stage of Allen's career is: he can get any player he wants and Kristen Stewart - an actress I can't get enough of - is on screen for significant lengths of time. She's miscast in this movie, as almost everyone else is - and eventually she'll have to start playing grown-ups - but it's always a pleasure watching her.

A few explanatory lines - sadly missing from the script - are necessary because only the historically-minded (with some background in French history) will truly understand the theme. Which is that all the primary characters are trapped. Le Notre is trapped in a job he doesn't really enjoy. Madame Le Barre trapped in guilt for an accident she believes she caused. Louis XIV trapped in the vast expectations of his role as God King. And most notably: nobles trapped at an elaborate and idle court. This is where some knowledge of history is useful - understanding that Louis XIV understood that the only real danger to his dynasty was over-powerful nobles. The king didn't want his aristocrats plotting against him, so he brought them to court: where they could be watched constantly and they would exhaust their incomes in expensive clothes and gambling. If you don't understand Louis XIV's paranoia about his peers you can't understand what the courtier means when he tells Madame De Barre that the nobles are "trapped like mice".

On a Marxist note: money for formal gardens didn't grow on trees back then either, so every facet of Versailles was built on the sweat and blood of nameless peasants who funded the gardens but would never be permitted to see the gardens. The aristocrats walking through the greenery were free of taxes on the other hand - true parasites whose descendants roughly 150 years later were taken to the scaffold to have their heads struck off. One of history's great corrections.

Aside from all of the above, the film has some very effective moments as it walks along its ultra-predictable path. Although the sturdy Kate Winslet who appears here cannot be mistaken for the much more petite Kate Winslet from "Titanic".

There are probably worse ways to spend an hour and a half. One genuinely hilarious moment - but otherwise the strength of this movie is the "feeling" of New York City. A kind of tonic for those who've been to Manhattan and enjoyed the experience. It's the real city - not the imagined city of some films - the clanging, banging, grubby, smelly hive of people following all their personal mandates, getting around by public transportation. The kids are just couriers in a strange plot involving briefcases (a reference to "Pulp Fiction" perhaps) that we don't really understand until near the end - but why they're thrown together is immaterial, really. The point is the hesitating start of a romantic relationship. You can judge for yourself if there's "chemistry" between these two. I didn't see that there was much going on. There's nothing new about their reluctance to get involved with each other - the writing is not nearly up to the standard of the "screwball" comedies of the past - and the ending is just Hollywood boilerplate - but it's harmless entertainment and you could do a lot worse.

The supernatural meets Noir in what you might call a particularly Spanish combination - and visuals somewhat reminiscent of "Blade Runner" since the rain in the narrative appears to be almost continuous from beginning to end. We are in the province of Navarre, the north of Spain, snug with the French border, a brooding landscape of hills, forest, and fast flowing streams - and we have a female detective, haunted by some truly haunting memories of her childhood in this same town. The film itself is very compelling - but with a couple of issues. In such a small isolated community identifying a suspect should take hours...not days - and perhaps the point is that even the best cop has a hard time seeing what's right in front of her. And it's hard to make sense of the ending, logistically speaking. It's gut-wrenching drama, but unclear how everybody gets to where they are. The first of three films based on a trilogy of famous novels in Spanish - so an opportunity to get to know the main character and this part of the world even better - but you do have to be prepared to see some of the darkest sides of human nature.

London, of course, is where you go to make a lot of money - and also to launder a lot of money if you have money that needs cleaning up - normally done through the kind of real estate transactions at the center of the narrative. I have a real weakness for non-traditional detectives and Tommy Ahktar is swimming against the current when it comes to the expectations of a fictional PI - basically a one-woman man it seems - no car, no gun - no trench coat - living at home with his dad. The only agreement he has with someone like Phillip Marlowe is his ratty, cluttered office upstairs from a shop. And Tommy is something of an outlier from his Islamic heritage as well: appearing to live on whiskey and cigarettes - his standard bar request "double Turk" (two shots of Wild Turkey, no water, no ice) being instantly understood by most bartenders he knows. As far as the narrative line, there are a lot of Russian hookers in London - and now one of them is missing: leading to a familiar story of greed and betrayal under what feels like a steady rain. A very good genre movie - highly recommended.

Certainly deserves better than a "6". Really a charming story about two people who've been wounded - and are looking for human contact without being wounded again. It's an ambition common to us all, but this construction has a lot of invention. The character arcs and the narrative arc are predictable -but inside of them there are satisfying little surprises here and there that soften the blow of anticipating how He and She are finally going to end up. In sum: it could have been a boring story - but it's never boring - and this is one French director who happily doesn't seem to feel the need for breathless voiceover.

Possibly best remembered as a tax write-off for some very wealthy people. The numbers say it all: production cost of $13M...revenues of not even 220K. (Standing the Hollywood model on its head. What they want is production cost of $220K and revenues of $13M). This was a bomb by anyone's standards. A stink bomb. What's mystifying is how recognizable "names" were somehow persuaded to walk through these locations, act in this ridiculous way, say these ridiculous lines. And behind them: continuity, lighting, makeup, catering - all the logistical support for any serious film project - all watching this dying flounder flopping around on the sand. For the players, you might say that IMDB is the problem. If I'd gotten sucked into this picture I would want people to forget. I would want to pretend that I'd never even heard of it. But there's no way of forgetting. The bullet points explaining why this movie fails in so many important ways would extend out to the horizon if I had the time to write them all down. So I'll just summarize: a total waste of time and effort on the part of the cast and crew - and a total waste for anyone attempting to watch it, even with a runtime of 90 minutes. This ill-fated project should have died a quick death as soon as everyone got the script. They should have known then. But they went ahead anyway.

Ariel is semi-estranged from his abrupt and somewhat eccentric father. His father (Usher) lives in the Jewish section of Buenos Aires, while Ariel - living a more secular life - makes his home in New York City. Ariel has a girlfriend he's serious about and he wants her to meet dad, so the plan is to fly down to Argentina and everybody can meet everybody. Which is not what happens. I loved the fact that nobody in this movie looks like a movie star and Buenos Aires isn't looking all that great, either. I'm not even sure how many people caught on film are actually actors. Real people, in a real place, and a little story about a guy who comes home again and starts to wonder why he left. In the end, a sweet-tempered and amusing story - but a few things need explaining that aren't explained very well. Just a few more minutes to explain Ariel's sudden change in mood.

Of course it's an allegory - but about what? My first impression: a satire on uneventful life in the E.U. But then the ending nails it down. This is a story about The Afterlife - some Christian voices speculating that Heaven is just like the life we live now, only without the sharp edges. As this story suggests, a recipe for the most acute kind of boredom imaginable. A few funny moments. A few flashes of imagination. But - growing up in a Bible church in Midwest America - I could have suggested a lot more scenes to make this story more pungent. In the end, it's a lot of time spent to make a very small joke.

What you get when you have significant money - and zero ideas. There is no story. It's a pointless joke, without a punchline, and a waste of time (unless you have an interest in pretty people walking around). If you hit the "fast forward" button you'll have wasted only 40 minutes, instead of 80. And, believe me, you won't miss a thing.

And thus the title of this review explains the gaping plot hole that punctures this series of narratives and renders them unbelievable. True - somehow her peers on the police force have not figured out that she's a bonus size nutbar. But just in Series 1 she pulls the kind of stunts that would lead to charges in the normal world, and probably imprisonment - but that's OK! - because she cracks the case. And then in Series 2 I just dropped the whole thing as she goes off the deep end yet is somehow, somehow, somehow still a cop. And somehow still a cop in the UK, where we've seen police procedurals forever and whose standards we are well-acquainted with. If you like shows that are Dark, well then welcome to Dark. If you like crime drama that's credible, forget about this one.

OK - so it's not hard to predict where this is going - but, just in case you have no idea what life is like on the West Bank, this film is full of gritty reminders what it's like to live under occupation...under someone's thumb, essentially. The lead character, Kais Nashif, reminded me so much of Michael Richards that it was distracting - but a clever story with a clever ending, and the startling information that you can buy hummus in a can.

The most overrated filmmaker of the 20th Century? Easy - it's John Cassavetes. Who basically set us up for an entire generation of guys with cameras who exposed warehouses full of film just wandering around waiting for an Epiphany. The listing here shows the names of the crew, but I have no idea what they did. Visuals are muddy - sound is terrible - lighting is terrible - everybody looks like they're wearing their own clothes. As usual with Cassavetes, the film's pace is catatonic, and the dialogue is crap because Cassavetes - who's credited as the "writer" - didn't actually write anything. He came up wtih a "context" and then told the actors to improvise. As we know, when actors improvise (unless they're exceptionally skilled) you end up with...crap. In conclusion, a love poem to Ben Gazzara. Cassavetes evidently wanted to have his baby. If you like Gazzara, then you might appreciate this supremely clumsy attempt to make a movie. You'll still be forced to sit through it if you go to film school. But otherwise, who's got time for this?

Stories about bequests are usually loaded with drama, since what is left to the living from the dead is usually take as a sign of affection , as a sign of neglect, or a sign of contempt. Not only is someone important gone forever - here's what they thought about the people they left behind. Of course all this is missing from this absolutely soporific story. To make an obvious point: drama isn't "drama" if there is no drama. There's clearly some disagreement. But what one person wants is clearly ridiculous - he's a mature man and he realizes that what he wants is not the most important thing in the world. So: no real conflict - no real story - so why is this a movie?

An unintentionally comic time capsule: commenting on social issues of the time and maybe not-so-seriously trying to predict what the future might look like. Not a lot of money spent. Not a lot of insight gained. And, in the end, not very incisive or persuasive. But you are reminded of how much the camera loved Ursula Andress. Almost no angle from which she could ever be seen to be less than gorgeous. The fashions of the time (hilarious) and an improbable ending mandated by the Production Code. A cheerful little time waster if you have nothing better to do.

Best picture? Most Politically Correct certainly. Something for the Gay Folks. Something for the Black Folks. Something for those of us who were bullied in school. Original? Not in the least. Not even in terms of style, which is just French New Wave. And maybe Black Folks might not appreciate the idea that the majority of them are felons or drug addicts? I can see why the producers got money to make this money. I don't see why people in the industry thought so highly of it.

Based on the narrative content, a film that should have been 15 minutes long. An absolutely glacial pace, and - if you intend to write a tale about romantic yearning - cast characters that might have some personal chemistry. Unpersuasive, really boring, and an ideal candidate for the way I watch a lot of art movies from Japan - hit the fast forward, read the subtitles, and see if anything worth watching eventually happens.

You wonder how Elizabeth Shue got sucked into this dreary attempt to retell a story so often told before. There is no attempt to build dramatic, or narrative, momentum and the whole thing looks like it was shot on Super 8MM. The ambition does not match the execution and - after a while - almost anyone watching might remember that they need to scour the kitchen sink and stop wasting time waiting for something to happen in this story.

What might be notes for a movie - a longer project which would have covered that fascinating scene in detail. As it is, a few observations:

• Useful to see that aging rock stars age just the same as the rest of us. As a matter of fact, easy access to drugs and endless alcohol seems to render some of these characters almost incoherent.
• I don't care who his dad is: Jakob Dylan can't sing, and should have surrendered the concert stage to someone with a voice.
• If all Michelle Phillips wanted to do was sleep around, I wonder why she got married.
• You have a video where you mention The Association, but not The Doors? WTF?
• In reference to the above: the program skews heavily toward those who consented to appear, and - as also mentioned above - looks like an idea for a useful program that might cover all the artists working in LA during the period. Not just the ones who happened to be handy.