Recent viewing

Another installment of rapid-fire reviews of recent films in diary format:

Any evaluation of Calvary (MC-77, NFX) depends on how you add up the pluses and minuses of John Michael McDonagh’s highly heterogeneous film.  Things I liked included: impressive views of Sligo landscape, seaside, and village; Brendan Gleeson’s conflicted yet sympathetic Irish priest; the perspective on the Church’s change of status in contemporary Ireland; the mix of satire with serious consideration of religious vocation; the Guinness and the craic.  Things I didn’t like: some overly-theatrical writing and performance; the slipperiness of tone; the quasi-suspense reliance on murder to drive the story; some excess underlining of theme, as suggested by the title.  Still, with Gleeson occupying the foreground and Yeats Country in the background, I enjoyed watching this film, though disenchanted by the end.

But not so disenchanted that I didn’t seek out the previous McDonagh-Gleeson collaboration, The Guard (MC-78, NFX).  (There’s a third worth seeing, In Bruges, but that’s written and directed by John Michael’s brother, Martin.)  This genre mash-up was silly but smart, in ways that didn’t bother me as much as the overreach of the other film.  You can tick off all the influences -- from 48 Hours to spaghetti westerns, from Hawks to Tarantino – and still appreciate the fresh Celtic approach.  This time Connemara is the picturesque setting, and much fun is made of the psychic distance between Dublin and Galway, and the overriding insularity of the Irish.  Don Cheadle, as an FBI agent trying to head off delivery of a massive shipment of drugs, wonders to Brendan Gleeson, a do-it-his-own-way Irish lawman, whether he is “fucking dumb or fucking smart.”  Gleeson just smiles.  The film certainly gives him the benefit of the doubt, and I do the same with the film.  I put up with some over-eager genre borrowings for the quality of wit and surprise that the film generates.  And paired with his performance in Calvary, this marks Gleeson as one of the more versatile and substantial actors in the movies today.

The oddity Frank (MC-75, NFX) also touches down in Ireland, but goes awry when it departs for Texas and the SXSW music festival in Austin.  Freely elaborated from a real performer in the 90s, Lenny Abrahamson’s edgy film stars Michael Fassbender as the leader of an offbeat band that verges on a cult.  Wearing a large garish papier-mâché head that he never takes off, even in the shower, he and most of his bandmates (including Maggie Gyllenhaal) are refugees from mental institutions.  The outsider keyboardist who narrates and precipitates the story is played by Domhnall Gleeson, Brendan’s son.  The premise did not promise pleasure to me, but I was rather taken by the film’s deadpan wit and whimsy, until a sudden unmotivated turn took it in a direction that was grimmer and less satisfying.

After belatedly catching up with Transparent (which just won several Golden Globes), I looked into the creator behind the show, Jill Soloway.  After finding out that she ran The United States of Tara, which kept my interest longer than most Showtime series, I noticed that she’d won a Sundance directing award for Afternoon Delight (MC-49, NFX), so I decided to watch the film in spite of mediocre critical response.  My own response was decidedly mixed -- there’s no doubt that Transparent represents a big step forward, though movie and series come out of the same milieu, well-off Jewish families in LA, all endowed with sexual and other kinks.  Kathryn Hahn plays a bored housewife who throws a bomb into her life, by inviting a young stripper into her house; Josh Radnor is her husband, Juno Temple the unapologetic sex worker.  I glided over the improbable set-up, but stumbled on some turns of story and character.  In the end I decided it wasn’t all that much fun to spend time with these people, without the sort of alchemy that Transparent does somehow achieve.

Bird People (MC-70, NFX) took strange turns and ran long, so I wasn’t with it all the way through, but it turned out to be a film that lingers in the mind, and makes more sense in retrospect than it did at first viewing.  Pascale Ferran, director of Lady Chatterley, turns from that lushly sensual immersion in nature to the arid life of the modernly mobile.  Starting with random shots of people withdrawing into their devices, electronic and otherwise, as they ride the train to the Paris airport, the film settles on two faces in the crowd: a Silicon Valley executive (Josh Charles) stopping over for a business meeting enroute to Dubai, and a young college dropout (Anaïs Demoustier) working as a chambermaid in the Hilton airport hotel where he is staying.  They never really meet, but their stories unfold in parallel, he making the abrupt      decision to drop out of his life, and she magically soaring out of hers.  The observations are precise, even when the point is not obvious, mixing visual analysis and wild metaphor, without the usual promptings of storytelling formulae.  You may be puzzled, you may be bored, but you will definitely have something to think about.

I’m not feelin’ the love for Love is Strange (MC-82, NFX), which had its good points, but let me down at the end.  You can’t argue with the performances of John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a longtime gay couple, painter and music teacher, who finally get the chance to marry, but in the process lose their apartment and have to crash separately with friends or relatives.  I really liked the slices of New York life, and the realities of Manhattan real estate.  The oblique observational style of Ira Sachs appealed to me, as he tends to elide the dramatic moments and focus on meaningful sidelights to the main “action,” which is derived from Make Way for Tomorrow, the Depression-era drama of an elderly couple forced into homelessness.  Yet some scenes remained opaque to me, perhaps because I’m not sufficiently attuned to the Chopin that is integral to their effect, and the willful reach for sentiment at the end left me cold.

There are two touchstones widely cited in response to Jason Reitman’s departure from his earlier films in   Labor Day (MC-52, NFX).  Those who don’t like it, reference Nicholas Sparks for sappy implausible romance.  Those who do, hark back to Douglas Sirk and lush Fifties melodrama.  Me, I’m a Sirk fan and relished this film, without believing a minute of it.  Normally that’s a bar to enjoyment for me, but here I was happy to put my critical intelligence on hold, and just revel in the straight-faced nonsense.  First of all, it looked so familiar, shot in towns along MA Route 2 (I immediately recognized Shelburne).  Then there’s Kate Winslet, who can make the most ridiculous of plot points convincing.  Josh Brolin uses his undertone of menace to establish his character as escaped convict, while overlaying a romance novel’s portrait of an ideal partner – hunky handyman, completely sympathetic cook and baker, perfect father substitute to teenage son.  Okay, okay, it’s an utterly preposterous adaptation of female fantasy fiction – just relax, and enjoy it.  There’s even a little light bondage for “Fifty Shades” fans.  If Streep and Eastwood were enough to make you swallow Bridges of Madison County, then Winslet and Brolin may do it for you here.

I have to put a question mark after the title of What If (MC-59, NFX).  Michael Dowse’s film is a harmless little rom-com, updating a familiar formula.  Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan make an appealing will-they-won’t-they couple.  The Toronto setting is fairly fresh, and there’s a recognizable connection to real life, above and beyond the whimsy.  But it’s all remarkably unsurprising, and somehow the romantic choices of twenty-somethings are not that thrilling to me anymore.  Unless, of course, raised to startling particularity or universality.  This film is not of that class.

You cannot be more surprised than I at how enjoyable The Lego Movie (MC-83, NFX) turns out to be, neatly negotiating the trick of being corporate merchandising at the same time it’s making fun of corporate merchandising.  If there’s ever been a Lego-lover in your life, you’re likely to relish this confection, insanely busy but consistently witty.  The animation apparently is a mix of stop-action and CGI, in a universe constructed totally of Lego blocks and peopled by blocky Lego figures, many of them licensed characters.  The pop culture references fly fast and furious -- no one could get them all, but everyone can get enough to stay amused throughout, maybe even agree with the catchy Devo-derived theme song, “Everything is Awesome.”  Directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord seem to have taken the corporate sponsor’s money, and decided to have as much fun as they could playing with the toys, whether they followed the instructions or not.

From fast and funny to slow and stately, from computer-generated to hand-drawn, from the complexly simple to the simply complex -- The Wind Rises (MC-83, NFX) represents the animated antithesis to The Lego Movie, though each deserves its identically positive Metacritic rating.  Both are geared more to adults than to children, but while one smoothes its rough edges, the other leaves them defiantly on display.  Hayao Miyazaki’s last film is in essence a biopic of the aeronautical engineer who designed Japan’s Zero fighter plane, which turned the lovely wonder of flight into an effective weapon of imperialist aggression.  Neatly bookended with Porco Rosso, this film brings Miyazaki’s trademark flights of aerial fantasy into the real world of warfare and natural disaster, both large- and small-scale, from a devastating earthquake to a young tubercular woman coughing up blood.  I always prefer to watch foreign animation subtitled rather than dubbed, but this is one I plan to watch again sometime in English, not just for the quality of the voiceover actors, but in order to concentrate on the glorious visuals and enigmatic storytelling, to appreciate the many dimensions of this 2-D animation.