→ January 13, 2020
→ By

Little Women.

Greta Gerwig’s debut as a writer and director, Lady Bird, was a largely autobiographical story of her own teenage years in Sacramento, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role as Gerwig’s fictional stand-in. Ronan repeats the performance in a way as Jo March in Gerwig’s generally wonderful adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women, helping with the framing device Gerwig uses to tell the story in a nonlinear way… although Ronan here is completely upstaged by one of her own (fictional) sisters.

Little Women was itself an autobiographical novel of Alcott’s own upbringing in Massachusetts, telling the story of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, who live with their mother Marmie and housekeeper Hannah while their father is away serving as an army chaplain during the civil war. The book, published here in two parts (and, in something I just learned, still sometimes seen abroad as Little Women and Good Wives), covers a period of about four years that sees the girls through courtships and tragedy, finally ending with three of the girls marrying and – there’s no way you don’t know this – one of the four dying of complications from scarlet fever. It was an immediate commercial success, spawning two further sequels (which I’ve never read), and remains a favorite for young readers today, in part because it’s one of the only novels of its century that truly focuses on its women, both as unique, well-developed characters themselves, and as women in a highly restrictive, patriarchal society.

The framing device Gerwig uses wears out its welcome a little quickly, especially given some of the abrupt transitions between past and present. She splits the time period across the seven years between Beth’s illness and her death, using different lighting and, eventually, a different haircut for one character as ways to distinguish between the periods, but some of the scenes don’t have enough time to develop fully because the next cut yanks you out of that moment and into a different one entirely. The shot of Jo grieving at her sister’s grave ends way too quickly and transitions to a scene of relative mirth that I think robbed the former of some of its power. There’s probably a good way to tell this story in a nonlinear way, still using the motif of Jo writing her great novel about her family as the framing device, that doesn’t make some of the intervening scenes so terse.

Beyond that, however, this film is just great, anchored by so many wonderful performances that it’s hard to identify just who is carrying what. Ronan is very good as Jo, although of course she is far prettier than Jo is ever described on Alcott’s pages, and particularly excels in any scene where she gets to crank up her emotions in any direction – and in her scenes with Laurie, played rakishly by Timothée Chalamet, who might as well have been born to play this young bachelor on the road to roué. But Florence Pugh is the biggest star here as Amy, a character who gets more emotional growth in the movie than she does in the book, going much farther from snotty younger sister to a young woman aware of how little the world might value her, fighting for any agency she can find. Pugh isn’t the lead, but I think she’s more important to this movie than anyone else.

Laura Dern might win Best Supporting Actress for her turn in Marriage Story, but I liked her performance here as Marmie even more – she’s the original supermom, showing the patience of a saint, and delivering one of the best and most memorable lines in the movie when Jo asks why she’s never angry. Bob Odenkirk is only in the film briefly as Mr. March, but he’s wonderful and is fast becoming one of my favorite character actors, even when the role requires little or no humor at all. Chris Cooper is delightful as Laurie’s grandfather; Meryl Streep does quite a lot with Aunt March, even though the character has maybe one and a half notes to her. Even Tracy Letts has a minor role as Jo’s publisher, and he’s the perfect amount of grump for the job.

And then there are the other two sisters, Meg, played by Emma Watson, and Beth, played by Eliza Scanlen. Watson just seems miscast here, speaking with a sort of affected precision that doesn’t line up with Meg, who truly wants the life of domesticity for which she’s destined. Scanlen, though, is just plain weird as Beth, who is also written strangely – made more infantile on the screen than she is on the page, which becomes particularly offputting when Beth is 13 and 14 in the earlier time period and she’s portrayed by an actress who is 21. Meg’s character isn’t that critical to the film, but Beth’s is, and the portrayal here is a bit jarring.

The ending Gerwig cooks up is rather sublime, and a welcome departure from authenticity. Jo is even more Alcott here than she ever could be in the novel, and Gerwig slips in some details from Alcott’s life to spice things up a bit, making her a shrewd negotiator and getting us to the big finish with a metafictional flourish for the ages. It’s not faithful to the source material, but given how problematic Jo’s literary marriage – which Alcott apparently wrote under duress from her publishers – is for the novel and her character, this is a substantial improvement.

We’ll find out the Oscar nominations the same morning I post this, but I’m guessing we’ll get Best Picture, Best Actress (Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Pugh), Best Costume Design, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with maybe even money on Gerwig getting a Best Director nod. We’ll see if the backlash against the Golden Globes’ all-male director slate helps Gerwig at all; (I’m assuming three slots are locks, for Scorsese, Tarantino, and Mendes, with Boon Jong Ho a good shot at the fourth.) It’s not Best Picture, but it’ll certainly end up in my top 10 once I’ve finished the various candidates from 2019; as long as Pugh gets a nomination, though, I’ll call that a win for the film.

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→ January 8, 2020
→ By

The Farewell.

Awkwafina got her start as a Youtube comedic rapper, and didn’t even earn her first live acting credit in anything but a short film until 2016’s Neighbors 2, so her rise from that to a Golden Globe for Best Actress – which she won this weekend for her outstanding lead performance in The Farewell – is one of the more incredible and heartening stories out of the movie world in some time. (Was Cate Blanchett all teary with joy when Awkwafina won? I kind of think she was.) I haven’t seen all of the nominated actresses’ films in that category, but I can say Awkwafina gave a performance worthy of awards, and without her and the way her coarse, rational character contrasts with the rest of her slightly loopy family, The Farewell wouldn’t be half the film it is.

Awkwafina plays Billi, a 30ish, struggling Chinese-American writer who has just learned she didn’t get a fellowship she was hopeful she’d land, when she finds out that her grandmother in China, to whom she was once quite close, is dying of lung cancer. The catch is that the family, adhering to a cultural tradition, isn’t telling the grandmother that she’s dying, so she can continue to live her life as if everything was normal until it reaches a point where the truth becomes inevitable (if it ever does). Billi isn’t on board with the plan, since it involves lying to a beloved family member, so her parents tell her not to come with them to China for what is presumably the last visit they’ll have with Nana. Of course, she defies them and flies there on her own, and hilarity ensues in the face of a terminal diagnosis, from the internecine squabbles about telling her, Nana’s desire to find Billi a husband, culture clashes with other cousins who remained in China, and, oh by the way, the sham wedding of Billi’s first cousin to a woman h met in Japan (who speaks no Chinese of any dialect) that is the excuse for everyone coming to visit Nana at once.

Part of the beauty of the comedy of The Farewell is that the premise is rather simple: They’re not telling Nana she’s dying and they’re all there for a fake wedding. Everything else flows naturally from that setup; you just had to get the characters in one place for an obnoxiously passive-aggressive argument about whether the United States or China has the superior culture or is the better place to send your child for college to break out. Billi is often in the middle of the comedy, but not necessarily its prime mover; sometimes she’s Bob Newhart, the ‘normal’ one surrounded by crazy people, providing the voice of reason. 

The scenes with Billi and Nana are more tender, as if maybe Billi can forget for a moment that her grandmother is dying, than the family scenes, where she and her parents keep switching to English to talk about the propriety of the ongoing lie, which also gives the film some needed contrast. I expected more of a one-note story, yet The Farewell is anything but, especially avoiding the trap of simply making Billi the heroine whose position is right and thus for whom you’ll root in every argument. (You will sometimes, though.) Rather than burdening the script with major subplots, writer-director Lulu Wang, who based the story on her own experience with her family and her own grandmother, adds small flourishes to flesh out the main story. The best of these lets Nana’s sister tell her own story, explaining her role in the family, which gets exactly the screen time it needs without becoming a needless, ongoing plot point.

Awkwafina’s win might be the boost she needs to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress this year, which would be great news as I don’t think I’d put more than one performance over hers of what I’ve seen (Scarlett Johanssen in Marriage Story, although she has less to do overall). It seems like it would be an upset for The Farewell to get a Best Picture nod, but I’ll be pulling for it – and GoldDerby.com‘s Oscar odds page has this fifth in Best Screenplay and even has Zhao Shuzhen, who plays Nana, ranked 6th among candidates for the Best Supporting Actress award. (She’s very good.) It’s a good movie, maybe a little insubstantial to say it’s a great movie, but a movie I’ll root for next month, and one I’ll encourage a lot of people to see because almost anyone could watch this movie. It’s a very human story, simply told, without distractions or things to deter anyone from enjoying it.

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→ January 6, 2020
→ By

The Irishman.

I had to get sick to watch The Irishman. 

At three and a half hours, it’s the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a single sitting at home or in a theater; I’ve watched longer films, including Lawrence of Arabia, but over multiple days, because my attention span’s normal limit is around two hours and it takes a lot to overcome that. This Friday, though, I was knocked out by a virus and had a fever high enough that I wasn’t leaving the couch, so we watched Martin Scorsese’s latest entry in his opus of films around organized crime, about a serial liar and trivial mob figure who, near the end of his life, ‘confessed’ to numerous murders, including that of Jimmy Hoffa.

Taken from a dubious non-fiction book called I Heard You Paint Houses (which appears on-screen in an alternate title card), The Irishman follows the career of Frank Sheeran as he goes from a truck driver who delivers meat between Philadelphia and DC to consigliere to a local don, Russell Bufalino, and later to Hoffa himself. It’s a sprawling story with an epic scope but a focus on minute interactions, giving Scorsese’s three leads a chance to do what we all presumably came to see them do – and to see them as younger doppelgängers of themselves, thanks to digital de-aging technology, so Scorsese can use the same actors across a thirty- to forty-year span.

(By the way, Slate breaks down how Sheeran likely confessed to a slew of murders and crimes he never committed. The story is mostly fiction, with lots of real people in it.)

Frank is played by Robert De Niro, who probably looks the least like himself when he’s de-aged but whose voice and accent are unmistakable. (Although the characters are supposed to be from Philadelphia and Detroit, the accents sound a lot more like Brooklyn Italian-American to me.) Hoffa is portrayed by Al Pacino, also given away by his voice even when he’s also been de-aged. Both deliver solid performances, De Niro’s a bit more workmanlike yet a character a bit independent of the movie around him, Pacino infusing the bombastic Hoffa with the kind of bombast Pacino is known for giving his characters.

But this movie is dominated by a scene-stealing performance from Joe Pesci as Russ; I can’t say I ever forgot it was Joe Pesci, because how could you ever forget that, but of the three actors he is by far the most convincing and the most fully in character. Known for playing hair-trigger characters with on-screen histrionics, Pesci here is understated by comparison, measured, sounding well-reasoned even he’s asking Frank to take someone out (and I don’t mean for drinks). He seems the least like someone playing an archetype in a film about mobsters, even though that – and My Cousin Vinny – is what he’s best known for doing. It helps that the de-aging was least noticeable on him out of the big three. For him to come out of retirement – he’d last appeared in a live-action role nine years ago – and deliver this performance is remarkable, and I assume assures him an Oscar nomination.

The film indulges in those archetypes, both in characters and in plot points, although by the end it’s clear that Scorsese, at least, is making a much larger point about the pointlessness of such violence, and how it threatens to dehumanize the perpetrators in the long run. The various executions are gory but ultimately mundane for their frequency, and the ease with which Frank can deliver either a beating or a bullet is never explained even in the extended introduction to his character (which does introduce one of the many wonderful minor performances in the film, this one from Ray Romano). At three-plus hours, the repetitive nature of this cycle becomes clearer, and while the violence is stylized, it’s not glamorized – it’s ugly, and futile, and by the film’s conclusion, everyone involved is either dead or left with nothing.

Frank himself has been shut out by one of his daughters, played almost wordlessly by Anna Paquin in over 25 years in the movie’s present tense, and pleads with another daughter for her to help reconnect them, which she refuses to do. One of the most memorable, awful scenes in the film is when Frank goes to a funeral parlor and shops for caskets (the salesman is rapper Action Bronson, who literally doesn’t seem to know how to stand while Frank is talking to him); when the salesman asks who the casket is for, Frank reveals it’s for himself. No one else cares enough to do this for him. He will die unloved, and likely unlamented.

Paquin’s nearly silent role has come in for a lot of criticism, but the reason is so clear, and writing the character that way, as opposed to making her angry and voluble and demonstrative, is powerful in its own right and because it plays against stereotypes of women in films. The general lack of women characters of any substance in the film is a bigger problem, and not one about or limited to Paquin’s character; Frank leaves his first wife for his second and it barely merits a mention, while his wife and Russ’s are there on a road trip the four take from Philly to Detroit but they’re there for nothing more than comic relief and smoke breaks. And it’s not as if the film lacks room for female voices – there’s a fair amount of fat in this film, at least twenty minutes’ worth of overlong montages or scenes of old white men talking to each other too slowly. The entire sequence leading up to the murder of “Crazy” Joe Gallo, which eyewitnesses say Sheeran did not commit, and the murder itself could have been left out without hurting the film at all, since the murder doesn’t matter in the subsequent timeline of the movie.

The Irishman is going to earn a slew of Oscar nominations, obviously. It’ll get a nod for Best Picture. Scorcese will get one for Best Director. I think all three of my fellow paesani will get acting nominations. A movie of this length hardly exists without extensive editing, and while I have some quibbles with a few specific cuts, I think the sheer size of the job gets the editor(s) a nomination there as well. I won’t be surprised if it wins Best Picture, but little else, however, as the film is more than the sum of its parts, and if you like this film, you love this film. I’ll just personally root for Pesci to take a statue home as well.

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→ December 30, 2019
→ By

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most frustrating filmmakers working today, a brilliant author of dialogue with a unique eye for scene and setting, prone to bombast, pretension, and general excess that nearly always ends up detracting from even his best movies. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (now on amazon & iTunes) is one of the best things he’s done, and it’s also way too long and frequently too clever by half, buoyed by a pair of tremendous lead performances and burdened by the lack of interesting women and a meandering plot.

Once is another alternate history, in a similar vein to Inglourious Basterds and even Django Unchained, although this time around Tarantino’s playing with facts is subtler until the film’s climax. He gives us two lead characters, TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double/personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and follows them from the end of Dalton’s star turn on a TV western Bounty Law through a dry spell that eventually leads him to work against type as the ‘heavy’ and to star in some spaghetti westerns, all in the late 1960s. Their paths intersect multiple times with Dalton’s neighbors, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha, his first English-language film role), and with a group of hippies who just happen to be living on the Spahn Ranch under the spell of a charismatic cult leader named Charles Manson (Damon Herriman, reprising his role from Mindhunter and a damn good likeness). Cliff picks up a flirtatious hitchhiker (Margaret Qualley) who brings him back to the ranch, which helps set the plot on its alternate path away from actual events and gives us the most Tarantino-esque part of the film, the over-the-top violence in the big finish.

This movie is quite good, almost great, but it’s way too long. All three of Tarantino’s feature films since the death of his longtime editor Sally Menke have run 160+ minutes; Menke edited all of his films before she died, and none ran that long unless you want to consider Kill Bill as a single film. There is so much fat to trim from this film that you could easily have brought it home in close to two hours; the entire tangent showing Rick working in Italy is wasted time, and many scenes, including most of the driving scenes in L.A. and Rick’s tantrum in his trailer after he flubs his lines on set, could have been cut by half without losing anything of merit.

That criticism shouldn’t take away from how strongly Tarantino establishes this setting from the start of the film. It looks incredible in every aspect – clothes, hair, cars, background – and sounds just as good. If Tarantino was trying to capture a specific moment in time at a specific place, he nailed it, both in terms of this golden age of Hollywood and the post-Summer of Love counterculture movement that helped give rise to the Manson cult. Some exposition early in the movie – the scene at the playboy mansion, which gives us a great cameo from Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen – does help establish the setting, and to try to put the audience under the spell of the film, which might have held all the way to the climax had Tarantino not gone off on multiple needless digressions like Rick’s brief career in spaghetti westerns.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also full of Tarantino signatures, which is mostly a positive thing. There’s tons of quick, snappy dialogue, especially in the many movie/TV show scenes within this movie, including DiCaprio’s Oscar-reel moment where he’s playing the villain in a western and gets to chew the scenery with the help of a precocious actress playing the little girl his character has kidnapped. There are cameos galore, including Lewis, Bruce Dern, and Lena Dunham (who … doesn’t really work here), as well as the stunt-casting of children of famous actors as many of the Manson followers (Qualley is Andie MacDowell’s daughter; we spotted the children of Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman and Demi Moore/Bruce Willis, while director Kevin Smith’s daughter is here too). The movie is full of references and callbacks to other Tarantino films, a few of which I caught, including the dead-obvious riff on Inglourious Basterds. And it wouldn’t be a Tarantino film with lots of vaguely creepy closeups of women’s feet, especially the bizarre shot of Margot Robbie’s as Tate is watching herself in a movie theater and enjoying the positive reaction the audience has to her scenes, which is kind of ruined by the way her feet, propped on the seat in front of her, ruin the perspective of the shot and make her head (covered with comically large eyeglasses) seem so small in comparison.

Between the sheer ambition of the movie, Tarantino’s reputation, and the fact that it’s a movie about movies, this feels like a lock for a Best Picture nomination. I’m assuming Pitt will submit for Best Supporting Actor, and will absolutely get a nomination, while DiCaprio seems likely to get one for Best Actor. The most prominent actress in the film is Robbie, whose lack of dialogue has received much coverage already (with merit), and while I think she does the most she can to use body language to infuse Tate’s character with that of the promising ingenue, about to embark on a career of stardom, there just isn’t enough for her to do on screen. Qualley might have more dialogue, and if there was any doubt after The Leftovers that she could be a star, this ought to end it, but she’s also a side character and only in the movie for maybe 20 minutes. Beyond that, I could see Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and definitely Best Cinematography for the unusual shifts in perspective that Tarantino employs to change your sense of scale, including the wide shots of the Spahn Ranch and the party at the Playboy Mansion (where Dreama Walker plays Connie Stevens in a wig that perfectly mimics Stevens’ look in 1969), and one for Best Makeup and Hairstyling too. For what it’s worth, though, I wouldn’t vote for this over Parasite for the top honor.

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→ December 21, 2019
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/21/19.

I wrote two ESPN+ pieces this week, on the Madison Bumgarner contract and the Corey Kluber trade. I didn’t chat this week as I’m preparing for the holidays and had a lot of personal business that required my time.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top ten games of 2019 for Paste and the best board games of 2019 by category for Vulture. I’ll have a piece up this weekend on Ars Technica ranking the best board game apps of the year. Also for Paste, I ran down the best games I saw at PAX Unplugged earlier this month.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st from William Morrow (Harper Collins). You can pre-order it now through that link or wherever delicious books are sold.

And now, the links…

  • The Mormon Church has built up a $100 billion fund they claimed was for “charitable” purposes, but has hoarded much of the money and only made distributions to two for-profit businesses owned by the church, which if true is a massive case of tax fraud.
  • Professor Julie Sedivy writes about rediscovering her parents’ native tongue, Czech, after her father died, and how the process reconnected her with her roots.
  • I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and have been struck by just how much of a creep Richard Feynman appears to be in his own telling. It turns out I’m far from the only one who noticed, and, worse, his second wife accused him of physical and verbal abuse. To make it worse, the audio version has its own problems, such as the narrator trying to imitate non-American accents, with an especially cringey version of a Japanese accent that might make Krusty the Clown blush.
  • Over at the Atlantic, Amanda Mull says enough with the year-end rankings, and while I agree there are a lot of those posts, I think she misses a large part of the point: They become both conversation starters, which is one of the main reasons I post rankings here, and ways to find new music or books or movies you might not have heard about previously.
  • Clint Eastwood is clearly a chauvinist asshole, with his new film, Richard Jewell, fabricating a story about a real journalist offering sex in exchange for information – a story that never happened, about a journalist who has since passed away and can’t defend herself. Ankita Rao writes in the Guardian how harmful this pervasive stereotype is.
  • I guess one good thing about the ongoing measles epidemic in the U.S. is that it is waking up more media outlets to the existential threat anti-vaxxers pose. Men’s Health has a column from Jacqueline Detwiler on how scientific BS has brought measles back, and how we can fight for science against denialists.
  • A bill in the New Jersey legislature to end non-medical exemptions to mandatory schoolchild vaccinations – which is only rational, since there are no religious prohibitions on vaccinations, and if you have a “philosophical” objection to vaccination then you can just home-school your kid – stalled in the Senate after vocal protests from anti-vaxxers. The Newark Star-Ledger’s editorial board commented by saying that the anti-vaxxer movement has gone off the rails, comparing vaccinations to “hate crimes.” Do you live in New Jersey? Find your legislators and call them Monday to let them know you support this bill.
  • The Washington Post‘s Dave Sheinen profiles fringe relief prospect Gabe Klobosits to talk about how the proposed cuts to minor league baseball might impact players at the margins of organized baseball. It’s a good piece, but I think it’s an anecdotal argument that doesn’t consider how many other players like Klobosits never pan out (and he hasn’t yet) and what the overall cost is to employ and develop those players, and additional coaches and staffers, in the hopes you’ll find one or two hidden big leaguers.
  • A disabled artist designed a hotel room that is deliberately difficult to stay in, trying to mimic the experience disabled people have in rooms designed solely for the non-disabled, for the Art B&B in Blackpool, England.
  • I do like my elite status when I get it, so this New Yorker piece on the madness of airline elite status hit rather close to home.
  • The Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a trade partner, trading ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows with the U.S., even though Wakanda is a fictional country. We have handed the keys to our government to the dumbest possible people.
  • China responded too slowly to a pig virus called African swine fever, leading to an epidemic and fears it will spread beyond China’s borders.
  • I’d never heard of Bolze, a French-German hybrid language spoken in a small town in the canton of Fribourg, before finding this BBC Travel post about the language and its associated culture.
  • The Anti-Defamation League now lists the ‘ok’ hand gesture as a symbol of hate, depending on context, of course.
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→ December 17, 2019
→ By

Booksmart.

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising … but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but never doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who have partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools. Molly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who appears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years, but has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she doesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to go to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie trying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they do arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as planned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads are both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie, and handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point, shockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel entirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until they get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein until she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen without her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side character with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids are effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s already and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting in a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny in an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact, just about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re asked to do – in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of place or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately. A couple of kids want to have fun/drink too much/get laid before they go to college, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first, only to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s some witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and things start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets kind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading to a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of marred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One of the girls ends up in jail – seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t Hardly Wait, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place – and the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they totally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most addresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in the span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs out of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story, right up to the resolution.

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of it seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the first few scenes – especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners are flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides. This movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget comfortably but spurring a weird social media campaign, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like the movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a big audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did their parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre teen comedies.

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→ December 10, 2019
→ By

Marriage Story.

Noah Baumback’s Marriage Story, now streaming on Netflix, landed six nominations yesterday for the Golden Globe Awards for Male Filmmakers, including Best Motion Picture and Best Screenplay, although it didn’t get a nod for Best Director. It’s a bit puzzling given how weak the film is in most aspects, with thinly-drawn characters, a story that actually isn’t all that interesting, and a stunning lack of self-awareness about how one-percenty this story is.

This isn’t a marriage story, but a divorce story. Charlie (Adam Driver, nominated for Best Actor) and Nicole (Scarlett Johanssen, also nominated) are splitting up, although she’s the more adamant of the two and eventually is the one who takes the firm steps to move from separation to divorce. He’s a somewhat successful playwright in New York and she is his muse and lead actress, but when she gets a part on a pilot in LA, she leaves and takes their eight-year-old son with her, which Charlie seems to think is temporary but Nicole intends to be permanent. Their trouble communicating, highlighted in the first of many caricatures with their incompetent mediator (who is playing couples counselor, not like an actual mediator), eventually leads Nicole to hire a strong attorney (Laura Dern, nominated for Best Supporting Actress and deserving) and to surprise Adam with divorce papers, after which the process becomes more contentious and further details of their marriage start to spill out.

The entire story is smug from start to finish, full of knowing nods to life in New York and LA. (Really, the tea and biscotti sequence was so cringeworthy.) There’s a lot of arguing about how they don’t really have any assets to divide, even though these are two hilariously privileged people. Nicole refers to Charlie as a narcissist and she’s not entirely wrong; for most of the movie, really up until he realizes that he might lose custody entirely, he’s wrapped up in himself, and comes off that way in Nicole’s retelling of their marriage and courtship, then again near the end when he’s telling his actors about mundane details of divorced life. I could have done without Driver’s weird karaoke thing towards the finish as well. What might have been interesting about their dying relationship is how the two of them are unable to hear each other, especially Charlie’s inability or unwillingness to hear Nicole and see her as an equal with agency and goals beyond his, but the script barely explores that at all, and eventually careens into two big arguments, one on the phone that introduces an element to the divorce that makes you turn completely on Charlie (with reason), and then a blowout argument in his apartment that rather confirms that he’s an asshole and ends in utterly unbelievable fashion.

Most of the side characters are painfully one-dimensional, starting with Henry, who is supposed to be 8 years old but still sits in a car seat meant for much younger kids, who whines like a younger kid, who doesn’t want to eat any food that touched the “green thing.” Baumbach wrote him like a kindergartener, and he’s played like one, which makes him kind of insufferable – just like nearly every other side character. Nicole’s mother is an atrocious character played with a nails-on-the-chalkboard childlike voice by Julie Hagerty. The expert who comes to observe Henry at his parents’ houses is impossibly mousy and humorless. The lawyers are better developed than the family members across the board, and I suppose if this were Lawyer Story that would make sense. 

Why do critics seem to love this movie? Do they see something of their own lives in it? It is anchored by a great performance by Johanssen, a solid one by driver, and some strong supporting turns by Dern, Alan Alda (just wonderful in a small role as an avuncular attorney Charlie hires), and Ray Liotta (looking roided up as a bulldog attorney Charlie consults), but Baumbach forgot to finish drawing everything around them – the other characters, the depth their back story required, or some of the realism around their conflicts after she’s served him with papers. Even the one revelation about Charlie, which of course happens all the time in actual marriages, ends up derailing the story in a way because he goes from maybe-the-bad-guy to definitely-the-bad-guy, rather than advancing the actual marriage story – and it gives us another scene with a one-dimensional side character that tries to be funny but doesn’t work either. I don’t get any of this, even though you might think that I’d be right in this film’s demographic. It feels like the story of a marriage and divorce written by someone who’s never gone through either.

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→ November 3, 2019
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Parasite.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes film festival, making director Bong Joon-Ho the first South Korean to win the top prize at that event, and the film has since racked up tremendous critical accolades and earned $5 million-plus already at the U.S. box office. It’s enough of a hit that it showed at my local, mainstream multiplex this weekend. It’s South Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t make the shortlist. On this Friday night, there were 20 people in the theater, including us, there to watch a Korean-language film with no actors who’d be recognized at all in the U.S. I’m thrilled to see it get this kind of audience because Parasite is a remarkable, funny, dark, and deeply metaphorical movie.

This upstairs, downstairs story revolves around the Kims, an unemployed family of four living in a dank semi-basement in Seoul where they steal WiFi from neighbors who forget to turn on passwords; and the Parks, a very wealthy family in the city with two young children and more money than they know what to do with. The two families intersect when Ki-woo, the Kims’ college-aged son who doesn’t attend school because he can’t afford it, gets a job filling in as the English tutor to the Parks’ teenaged daughter, Da-hye. Seeing how well the other half is living, Ki-woo hatches a plan to get the rest of his family hired – his sister as the Parks’ son’s art teacher, his father as the chauffeur, and his mother as the housekeeper – by also getting their existing help fired. This all goes very well until one night the housekeeper returns, revealing a secret of her own, turning the film from a hilarious farce into a darker satire that ultimately ends in violent chaos.

For about 3/4 of its running time, Parasite is consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. From the lengths to which the Kims go to perpetrate their con on the Parks or to justify their increasingly unethical behavior to themselves, on to the utterly ridiculous Park family themselves. The three Park characters who have something to do in the film – their son barely speaks at all – are all deeply stereotypical, with the mother (stays at home, can’t take care of herself or the house, heavily neurotic) and daughter (acts/dresses below her age, falls in love with her tutors) both so much so that I wondered if they were meant to be caricatures. The plot to get rid of the chauffeur is amusing; the subsequent plot to get rid of the housekeeper is bananas. Even as the film starts to become violent, there are still moments of humor, including some great physical comedy, until the final cataclysm tears the cover off and reveals the swirling mess of class rage that was beneath the surface the entire time.

Bong isn’t subtle about the fact that the film is replete with metaphor; Ki-woo uses the word “metaphorical” several times, often because he is trying to impress the Parks, but the presence of the word at all felt a bit like a message to the audience to wake up and smell the symbolism. There’s water everywhere in this movie, but while it’s clean and revivifying for the Parks, it’s anything but for the Kims; while water brings the Parks a modest nuisance, it eventually contributes to the Kims’ destruction. The physical locations of their living spaces – the Kims halfway (or more) underground, the Parks on the upper floors of a house with lower floors that they never even visit themselves – correspond to their relative status and their absolute status within a South Korea that rapidly developed after the Korean War but has created substantial income inequality, especially for older citizens. The rock, the Parks’ son’s artwork, the use of American “Indian” imagery – Parasite is absolutely rife with metaphors to underscore the conflict between the Parks and the Kims.

I assume Bong’s use of Kim, the most common family name in South Korea, for the lower-class family, was not a coincidence; Park is the third-most common name, so perhaps the point was that neither of these families is all that atypical, and that Bong is trying to represent wide swaths of Korean society. He’s also created a real dramatic balance between the two families; while the Kims are rascals, they’re not heroes, and if you were still rooting for them at the time that they dispatch the housekeeper, their ruse should be enough to dissuade you. There are no heroes here, no ‘good guys;’ it’s a movie about a lot of regular people who do bad things in the quest for money and all that it brings: status, comfort, freedom from future financial worry.

I won’t spoil any of the end other than to say it turns quite violent, although in the context of everything that has come before, it felt like the inevitable conclusion after two hours of growing tension that had no outlet for release, as the Kims wanted to preserve their ruse at all costs. When one of them finally realize that the Parks will never see them as anything but the hired help – and thus as lesser people – Parasite reaches a disturbing climax and conclusion that will cause you to rethink everything that came before.

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→ October 21, 2019
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High Life.

Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.

Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.

I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?

The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.

In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.

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→ September 10, 2019
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Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction‘s original French title, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”), does a much better job of summarizing the story itself, which covers two couples — a publisher, an author, an actress, and a political consultant – who cope with aging and the changing circumstances of life by having lots of sex with people other than their partners. It’s a smart and witty film, punctuated by one of the funniest meta-jokes I’ve ever seen, that has a lot to say about the inevitability of change and our inept ways of handling it. It’s streaming on Hulu and available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

Juliette Binoche, who continues to churn out tremendous performances nearly 35 years into her career, is one of the stars of Non-Fiction, playing the television actress Selena, the star of a French police procedural called Collusion; she’s married to literary editor Alain (Guillaume Canet), who has a strained relationship with onetime star author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne), who is married to the political consultant Valérie (columnist and comedian Nora Hamzawi). Selena is having a lengthy affair with the frumpy and morose Léonard; Alain starts sleeping with his firm’s young new digital media director Laure (Christa Téret) at the first opportunity. Léonard’s last few novels haven’t sold well, and Alain thinks his newest is a dud, which Léonard takes about as well as you’d expect – but Valérie has no sympathy for him and doesn’t even seem to like him very much. Meanwhile, Alain’s professional world is facing the upheaval of e-books and audiobooks as well as the changing demographics of fiction readership, while Selena grapples with the choice of continuing on a show that has made her successful but is professionally unfulfilling.

These are first-world problems, to be sure, but they are also somewhat universal at this point. Although writer/director Oliver Assayas focused the script on the massive shifts in the publishing world – which braced for a paradigm change that would lead readers to eschew dead trees for e-books, only to see readers gravitate back to physical books – technology is leading to similar creative destructions in lots of industries, changing the entire structure of employment and the relationships workers have to their employers. What hits Alain just at work over the course of the film could stand in for any industry.

The serial infidelities in the movie are a bit harder to grasp on a metaphorical level, although they provide a good bit of the humor. Selena seems broken up by the possibility that Alain is having an affair, but we find out shortly afterwards that she’s having one too – and it’s been going on for years. There’s a comic tension throughout as you wait to see if any of the spouses might figure out what’s going on and in watching various characters squirm when they might be caught, but understanding why Alain, married to a gorgeous and successful actress who seems to appreciate art and literature, chases a much younger woman just because she’s there is at least more opaque. Is it a reaction to change by regressing into adolescent behaviors? Similarly, if Selena is a significant TV star, why is her longtime affair – one in which she appears to have no emotional investment – with the mopey Léonard, a rather stereotypical modernist author who says he rejects materialism and tries to hold himself aloof from criticism that he obviously can’t bring himself to ignore?

For plot and purpose, Non-Fiction works far better out of the bedroom. Even the lengthy discussions of art for art’s sake, with somewhat obvious complaints like how these young kids don’t read any more, work well as parallels to the natural human inclination to romanticize the past and rationalize the status quo when we’re faced with the discomfort of change. (To borrow and slightly alter a line from Spike Milligan: I don’t fear change. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.) These four people are all adrift and facing some kind of imminent upheaval at work, with the threat of the same at home, and mostly react in similar ways, driven to poor decisions by uncertainty and doubt … like most adults confronted with the potential for significant changes at work or at home.

Binoche is wonderful, as always, although her character is more unlikeable than many roles she’s had before; Selena is a bit full of herself, especially about her job, and thinks nothing of advocating for her paramour to her own husband. Canet has the larger role, as we see so much more of him at work, and the subplot around his publisher is more significant than that around Selena’s TV show or Valérie’s work for a leftist candidate (a rather neglected side story). Macaigne is fine as the aloof, self-absorbed author, but I found zero reason to think that Selena would want a long-term affair with him, and the relationship between Léonard and Valérie is almost as befuddling.

Non-Fiction may also have clicked for me more than it would for many viewers – I’m not that much younger than these characters, am divorced, and work in a similar field that is also going through a lengthy period of tectonic-type changes. So much of the dialogue, which is fast-moving despite the weight of what Assayas wants to say, is insightful about facing changes as you get older that I found most of the film’s non-adultery content resonated with me. And that metajoke near the end is just (chef’s kiss).

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