Let’s be honest here. Airplane viewing is no way to judge a movie,
but I’m going to do it anyway, to continue my survey of the so-called best
films of 2018. On trips to and from the
UK this month, there were a couple available that I expect to make my own top
list, but I’ll wait for better conditions to watch them, rather than a tiny
screen and tinny earbuds, over the sound of jet engines, while trapped in
coffin-like seating.
Well, those conditions were
suitably torturous for viewing Vice (MC-61, streaming tbd). Director Adam McKay negotiated a successful
seriocomic approach to financial collapse in The Big Short, but this
biopic of Dick Cheney is neither serious nor comic enough. Christian Bale has always been an accomplished
thespian shapeshifter, and makes a credible Dick at various ages. Amy Adams delivers Lynne Cheney in Iron
Magnolia accents. Steve Carell is way
too likeable for Donald Rumsfeld, but Sam Rockwell is dim enough as W. Some facts are delivered, but the film fails
to give the devil his due, on either side, for the enormity of his evil, or for
the virtue of his actions in his own eyes.
You’ll be reminded of how bad he was, but you won’t understand him any
better.
On the other side of the
political ledger, On the Basis of Sex (MC-59, tbd) doubles down
on hero worship of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but seems superfluous after the popular
documentary RBG. Felicity Jones
is an appealing English actress, and occasionally gets future Justice
Ginsburg’s accent right, Brooklyn Jewish overlaid by Ivy League. The suddenly ubiquitous Armie Hammer is
charming as her famously charming husband.
Despite some aspiration, this film does not really rise above the level
of a tv courtroom drama, and never gets past her first big case.
You can see why the Oscar
went to The Green Book (MC-69, tbd), since it is certainly
sanctimonious and platitudinous enough for the Academy. But in spite of predictable writing and pedestrian
direction, the acting makes the film quite watchable, as long as you can keep
from rolling your eyes. Viggo Mortenson
chews his way through the role of outer-borough bullshit-artist goombah (with the
always-welcome Linda Cardellini as his understanding wife), who happens into a
job as chauffeur/bodyguard to Dr. Don Shirley, the real-life pianist and
musicologist (he literally lives in Carnegie Hall!) played with both dignity
and humanity by Mahershala Ali. They hit
the road in 1962 for a concert tour into the Midwest , then taking a turn into the still-segregated Deep South . Think of it as In the Heat
of the Night meets Driving Miss Daisy, with bits and pieces from
other movies, more than from anything like real life. Still, you want to see what these unlikely
road buddies will get up to, with the actors supplying some surprises that the
story never does.
Appropriately scaled to the
small screen, Can You Ever Forgive Me? (MC-87, tbd) came off as
the best of these four in-flight “based on a true story” movies. Melissa McCarthy shows unexpected range as a
sad-sack lesbian author, whose agent won’t even try to sell her third
biography, so she finds a desperate alternative source of income through
forging letters by the likes of Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. She enlists gay fellow-drunk Richard E. Grant
in her schemes, which prove lucrative for a while, but increasingly risky. Based on Lee Israel’s autobiographical book,
and directed by Marielle Heller (who emerges as a name to look for), this film
seems more authentic and lived-in than the others, not to mention more darkly
comic. And of course, I appreciated the
view from the margins of the Manhattan
