Author Archives: Jay

Pitch Perfect 3

The Barden Bellas from the first 2 movies are back, but they’ve been replaced. Having finally graduated from college, a new crop of girls is singing acapella at their alma matter and the old Bellas are feeling obsolete. Shitty jobs aren’t panning out and dreams are already broken, and the old Bellas are feeling obsolete (I know! Who would have guessed that majoring in mouth music wasn’t really the best life choice?!). A last ditch effort to reunite comes in an invitation to perform for the troops in a USO show and since the Bellas have literally nothing else going on (except for one unwanted pregnancy), off they go to a warn-torn Spanish resort hotel to do their part.

Now you might think that being in a war zone is the toughest part of this new chapter, but in fact, to the Bellas, because they’re not crazy AT ALL, the worst part is dims competing against bands that play instruments. How dare they! I thought college was supposed to prepare you for the real world but these ladies are literally not even prepared for guitars. Yeesh. (Not to give too much credit to the new “bands”, including Evermoist, led by Ruby Rose, because after seriously mocking the Bellas for being a “cover band”, it turns out they all do covers too! A Cranberries tribute is particularly poignant with the recent death of Dolores O’Riordan.)

Anyway. There was absolutely no call to make a third movie here, and the script strains so hard to justify itself you’ll want to buy it a squatty potty. If you absolutely must watch it, you’ll want to wait until it’s available at home, where you can fast-forward to all the Sia bits and avoid the inane “plot” (though you’ll want to hear John Lithgow sing with an Australian accent at least once, just to say you did). It’s pretty clear that this franchise needs to learn the same lesson the Bellas do: moving on is good.

Every Day

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A couple of weeks ago, after yet another heavy snowfall, Sean slid his beautiful car into a dump truck stubbornly parked in the middle of the road. Mournful, he sent me pictures of the damage (he was totally fine, the car incurred some ugly scratches) so that I could send a sympathy bouquet with my deepest condolences. He had his car doctor on speed dial of course, and this week he brought her in for cosmetic surgery. In the meantime, he’s traded in his flashy muscle car for a Toyota Camry rental and it’s destroying his soul. After a 6 minute drive he declared “Everything is backwards!” What, pray tell, is backwards, exactly? Well, the wipers. Well, not the wipers, but the wiper knob, it’s on the other side of the steering wheel. Is that all, Sean? Oh no. Another backwards thing: his car is fast, this one is slow. When I mention this seems more like opposites than backwards, he clearly does not appreciate the difference, or he doesn’t appreciate my pointing it out.

Cut to: a Camry-ride later, we’re at a screening of Every Day, the newest in teen romance. One of the “lead characters” is…well, not a ghost, maybe more like a soul, who migrates MV5BNDQwYTJhYWItNzY1MC00NzM5LWI1YjgtM2ExNzE3MWRiODk1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDI4MTE4OTU@._V1_SX1499_CR0,0,1499,999_AL_ to a different teenaged body every day. This entity will henceforth be named A. A. happens to fall in love with a girl named Rhiannon (Angourie Rice). Rhiannon never knows what her love will look like, so she just has to walk around school until she finds a stranger giving her the creeps. That’ll be today’s version of A.

As you can imagine, there are some challenges to dating someone who is, erm, bodily challenged. It’s a lot for a couple of kids to take on. Luckily, these aren’t normal teenagers but the world’s most tolerant, imaginative, understanding teenagers who are so open-minded they might just make this thing work (if only the skeptical\logical adults don’t get in the way). It’s hard to imagine less vain members of the selfie generation – A. runs the gamut from hot cheerleader to the fat sidekick from Spiderman: Homecoming, and yes of course A. chronicles them all on Instagram, because duh.

It seems statistically impossible that, of the more than a dozen young actors who play A., not a single one of them is any good, but this is where the long odds pay off. At some point the casting agent must have just said fuck it and gone for the perfect score, even if it is in the wrong direction. What I’m really grappling with is how old this movie made me feel. I am now so far away from being a teenage girl myself that I can’t even identify what a “cute boy” is anymore. Understand that my mother called me boy-crazy since I was 3; my bedroom walls were plastered in Luke Perry posters, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Joey McIntyre, and Leo, of course. So I used to be a bit of a heartthrob aficionado, not to brag. But now? My hottie-thermometer was stone cold. I could not have distinguished between the “hot boyz” and lint pulled up from between the sofa cushions. The struggle is real, y’all.

In conclusion: if you are a 14 year old girl, proceed with gusto. Everyone else should probably consider carrying a special spray just to ward this one off. Watching this movie is like main-lining progesterone. It hits you in the ovaries so hard I went home and immediately had the period cries.

Sean watched the movie hands clasped, eyes to the ceiling. Was he praying for his own death? We’ll never know. But as we walked back toward the Camry humbly awaiting us in the cinema parking lot, he wondered if it was actually his beloved Mustang simply manifesting itself in the ugly body of a reliable, economical, mid-size sedan. Maybe?

Paddington 2

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I’m not sure what happened, really. I saw Paddington 2 all by lonesome in a cozy dark theatre on a snowy afternoon and then promptly forgot to tell you all about it, apparently. I think it got swept up by the Black Panther press screening we attended later (is that right? I don’t even know anymore!).

Anyway, the bear. The bear is cute and cuddly and everything that is right with movies generally and family movies in particular. It does not particularly pander to adults (aside from that nostalgia factor) but its earnestness and whimsical panache will reel you in like a bear to marmalade.

Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville are back and Mary and Henry Brown, the big-hearted couple who adopted sweet Paddington in the first movie. He’s well ensconced in the Brown family, but gets into a bit of a scrape when his plan to earn money doing odd jobs (VERY odd jobs) for his aunt Lucy’s birthday present goes Brody-Paddington-2 awry. Basically he’s chosen too good a gift, and someone beats him to it – a thief! But it’s poor Paddy who gets the blame, and somehow he gets thrown into gen pop prison, even though a) he’s a bear and b) he’s really just a cub. It says terrible things about Britain’s criminal justice system, when you think about it. Anyway, while in prison he falls in with rather a rough crowd, as tends to happen, and soon he’s Knuckles’ bitch. I mean, it’s decidedly less vulgar than I’m implying. He and Brendan Gleeson basically make sandwiches together until until either they escape or the Brown family gets their shit together.

Hugh Grant joins the cast as a rather seedy actor, a part he seems quite qualified to play. In fact, a whole Boaty McBoatload of famous British actors line up to do these movies so you can basically play a rousing round of who’s who Bingo and never come up short.

Paddington 2 still enjoys a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and I’m certainly not going to be the difference maker. It’d charm the pants right off you, if only Paddington was the sort of bear who wears pants (he’s not; he thinks a coat and hat suffice). It’s awfully sweet but not tooth-decayingly, and it’ll warm up your hibernating heart.

Landline

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This movie is deliciously familiar.

Manhattan, 1995: a time when people still smoked inside, while sitting on their plush, wall-to-wall carpeting. Personal phone calls were made on the street corner, on a dirty pay phone, and it cost a quarter. And in the Jacobs home, a forgotten floppy disk leads teenager Ali to discover her father’s affair (and embarrassing erotic poetry). Ali (Abby Quinn) recruits older sister Dana (Jenny Slate) into her investigation. The pair are bonding for the first time, perhaps even bonding over the secrets and lies, while also coming to terms with their own sex and love lives.

It’s really fun to watch Quinn and Slate together on screen. It’s obvious the sisters have some history but ultimately they care about each other, and about their parents, who are seeming more and more human all the time. Do you remember the first time you saw your parents as fallible, flawed people? This is their discover. Their father (John landline-5931 Turturro) may be stepping out on their mom, but he’s also the geeky guy who still takes them to Benihana for special occasions even though they’re far too old. Their mother (Edie Falco) has never struck them as a sexual being before, but it turns out that she too has wants and needs, and that maybe not all her tears and concerns are for them. This is a really great script that unfolds over just a couple of days, but pivotal days that will completely reconstruct the family.

Director Gillian Robespierre clearly has some love for the 90s and at times coasts on those references, which are admittedly a bit indulgent, but fun to savour. Landline doesn’t exactly break new ground in terms of theme or content but it’s a commentary on cheating by cheaters, and the implosion of a nuclear family just as it was about to expire anyway. There’s some nostalgia here, not just for the time period, but for that period of time before the kids grow wiser than the parents. The family’s shifting dynamics exhibit growing pains that are universal. And the great work by a talented ensemble means this family is fun to watch even as their ship is going down.

I Could Never Be Your Woman

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This was such a weird movie I’ve waited two weeks to write the review and still haven’t found the angle. Not that it’s urgent: it’s from 2007, so you’re not exactly waiting on the edge of your seat to hear my proclamation. You’ve maybe even already seen it, but then again, probably not. It didn’t exactly make a big splash in the land of movies.

Here’s an interesting thing: it’s a film by Amy Heckerling, the woman who wrote and directed Clueless. This movie is about a woman, Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer), who writes a MV5BMTk3NDc3ODk2M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNDc3NDI3._V1_ TV show that looks and sounds a lot like Clueless. It’s about the very coolest of high school students, and stars adults who don’t quite pull off their roles. Among them – Stacey Dash, a crazy lady who was 28 when she played Dionne in Clueless and 40 when she reprised the role of too cool for school adolescent in this film. Paul Rudd, only a couple of years younger, turns up in this one too, playing a teenager on set and the role of younger suitor to Rosie, who is mortified. And, of course, flattered, and maybe interested.

Not that Rosie has a lot of spare time to consider younger lovers. She’s trying hard to save her show, and to co-parent with her youth-obsessed ex-husband (Jon Lovitz), and to parent her wise-beyond-her-years actual teenage daughter Izzie (Saoirse Ronan in her film debut – yeah, this kid was always going to be a star).

Anyway, there’s three paragraphs to distract from the fact that I still can’t quite make a pronouncement. The truth is, there’s some juicy satire here. It has lots to say about a woman’s insecurities, and generational differences in falling love, and the impossible standards of show business. But for every great little quirk (many provided by Ronan – her character parodies songs sort of a la Weird Al, but with a feminist twist, likely years beyond her grasp) there’s a lot of rom-com cliches to wade through. But there’s the added bonus of Tracey Ullman as a personified Mother Nature, guiding us through the dark forest of female self-esteem. Heckerling clearly has a lot to say and I bet this film was quite personal to her, but she spirals out of control a few times. In the end, if you’re a sucker for Paul Rudd (and let’s be honest: who isn’t?) or if you’re curious how a little girl with a strong Irish lilt fares blasting out the angry lyrics of a certain Canadian songstress, go ahead and look this one up.

Poop Talk

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Poop. Everybody does it; polite people don’t talk about it. Poop Talk features very few polite people. Make no mistake, Poop Talk is a documentary but it will not enlighten you or educate you. Instead it assembles dozens of your favourite comedians and asks them to relate their best bits about poop. Whether or not this documentary will entertain you depends entirely on your tolerance for scatological humour.

Personally, I have likely never laughed at a poop joke. I believe there’s a reason that we build sacred rooms in our homes devoted to just one thing: pooping. Bodily functions are private. Why bother doing them behind closed doors if we then fling the door open and MV5BMTA5ODIxN2ItMTE0My00NjZkLWEyNjEtZTcxNzVhMzQwMzQwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjMyOTQ5OTA@._V1_ proudly boast about our most disgusting feats? Having recently spent quite a lot of time with nephews aged 3,4, and 6, the phrase “no toilet talk” has left my lips more times than I can count. And now I realize I’m happy to do my part in teaching the future generation what’s appropriate to talk about in public and what’s not if it means no one has to sit through such a “frank” documentary every again.

Nicole Byer, Eric Stonestreet, Rob Coddry, Pete Holmes, Aisha Tyler, the Sklar Brothers, Nick Swardson, Paul Scheer, and Kumail Nanjiani are among the film’s culprits. Each brings a poop story to the table: airplane poops, public restrooms, bidets, sullied pants, ruined Passovers. Nothing is off-limits for this documentary, though it exists in a world where poop is still probably our favourite taboo. We may all be responsible for approximately 365 pounds of it per year, but most of us prefer to do it behind closed doors. Comedians, however, are not normal people. Emancipated from shame, they lay bare their most intimate poop details, and you can choose whether or not to laugh and commiserate. Eric Stonestreet is a notable exception: his list of places he won’t poop is extensive, and almost as long as mine. Thank you, sir, for being the single voice of reason.

Using almost exclusively talking head interviews, director Aaron Feldman keeps things simple and straight-forward, and never in my life have I been more grateful for a lack of illustrative graphics. I was one cutesy animation away from losing my shit. If we truly must do this, then let’s get in and get out as quickly as possible. A tight 75 minute running time is a blessing. The film’s philosophy is elemental: the more we share openly about these things, the more united we’ll be in our human experience. Around the globe and across all cultures, everybody poops. And some rare specimens have learned to turn shit into comedy gold.

Wilde Wedding

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Eve Wilde (Glenn Close), famous actress, is getting married. She should be good at it by now: it’s her 5th attempt. She has inspired a whole family’s worth of broken marriages, which is common enough I suppose, but I’m not sure why so many exes were invited to the wedding.

Eve’s first love, Laurence (John Malkovich), not a movie star but a very serious actor, is included. Eve’s current love, Harold (Patrick Stewart), a writer with terrible hair, is a bit intimidated. Is this civilized, or insanity? Eve’s granddaughter Mackenzie is making a documentary, “what does love mean to you?,” and the lineup of family members covered is immediately confusing. With so many spouses, are any of these people related?

The Minnie Driver and Peter Facinelli introduce lots of drugs to the mix, and what better on the eve of a family wedding where the first cousins are already kissing?

We tend to use ‘corny’ and ‘cheesy’ interchangeably, but they’re two different sentiments, and this movie highlights that fact perfectly: one will make you roll your eyes, the other will make you cover them. Both are incredibly uncomfortable. This is one of those movies where everything goes wrong, and wronger, in the most charmless way possible. The person who wrote this script clearly believes that bad behaviour at weddings is de facto, and that wild behaviour is entertaining. In fact, it makes me quite sad for the very venerable cast, brought so low by the material on display here. And just when you think they’ve hit every wrong note in the book, it gets worse. Predictably but not forgivably worse. To the point where even my dogs were barking at the screen, though that may have been in response to my increasingly high-pitched and indignant “REALLY?s”. Do not watch. The end.

Secret In Their Eyes

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Thirteen years ago, Detective Jessica Cobb’s daughter was found murdered in a dumpster on a case she was working on. Her close friend and colleague Ray was the one to find her. There’s no good way to break that news to a mother, and there was no way to stop Jess from climbing into that dirty dumpster to cradle her daughter’s dead body. The case was mishandled and the killer never found, mostly because her body was discovered outside a mosque in the months following 9\11 and counter-terrorism took precedence over murder investigations. This group of detectives, once close-knit, is ripped apart at the seams from the grief and the guilt.

Cut to: thirteen years later, Jess (Julia Roberts) and Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) meet up again, in the office of a new supervisor, Claire (Nicole Kidman). Ray has some news: he thinks SITE_030515_182.CR2 he’s found the culprit. 696 000 caucasian male inmates in American prisons every year; if you look at 1906 faces every night, you can cycle through the entire population in a year. Ray has done this for 13 years and finally has a bite. That’s just to let you know that it may be Jess’s kid who died, but it’s haunted Ray too. They haven’t kept in touch but Ray has never stopped looking. Jess isn’t sure she has the strength to follow the legal channels, but Ray convinces her that under Claire’s direction, things will be different.

This movie is about ghosts, and sacrifice, and justice. It’s a 2015 remake of a 2010 Argentinian movie that probably doesn’t need to exist since the original is so compelling. This one is not quite so complex and yet it’s harder to follow, the jumping back and forth between time lines not quite so clean. But Julia Roberts as a shadow of a woman, contorted with grief, is worth watching (her mother died during production; she returned to work after just 5 days), and so is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who brings a lot of grit and empathy to the role. Nicole Kidman even has a scene in which she’ll suck the air right out of the room. They’re great, and at times they elevate the material, but this movie lacks the thrill part of a thriller. There’s no real suspense generated, it just sort of feels like we’re waiting, and it’s the gloomiest waiting room you’ve ever spent 111 minutes in. Is the ending worth it? Well, I’ll tell you this: there is no happy ending when a mother’s only child is raped and murdered.

Sunlight, Jr.

10 Replies

Melissa and Richie have a pretty humble existence. They live in a motel room. He’s disabled, she works at a gas station where she’s stalked by her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend. It’s a charmless kind of life, dictated by poverty. It’s kind of dismal, but they have each other, and when they learn there’s a baby on the way, suddenly everything seems possible.

Unexpected pregnancy on a minimum wage salary is not my idea of “good luck” but sunlight_jr_2_pubs when Melissa loses her job and she and Richie get evicted from their home, the good days are clearly behind them. The cycle of poverty’s got a pretty nasty pull on them, and in many ways this feels like a companion piece to The Florida Project, though this one’s already five years old.

The Florida Project’s a little more palatable to watch. Told from the perspective of children, the poverty feels less oppressive, or at least it’s more optimistic. In this one, however, Melissa (Naomi Watts) and Richie (Matt Dillon) are middle-aged. They’ve made their choices. There doesn’t seem to be much room for second chances.

Naomi Watts is incredible in almost everything she’s in. The problem here is not the acting, but that the acting can’t possibly do much with a sometimes remarkably stilted script. Despite some empathetic performances, the script has zero uplift. It’s tough to watch, though it is a tribute to an experience authentic to too many Americans. Watts and Dillon may be mis-cast. I hate how work dries up for aging actresses, but the fact is, she’ll be 50 this year, so she’s hardly in fertile young American territory anymore. There are loads more people who’d be far more appropriate.

Still, nothing’s really going to make this movie great. It has good intentions but can’t quite connect emotionally. It’s tedious, gray, and doesn’t care to resolve any of the adversity encountered: tragic in many sense of the word.

Newness

8 Replies

Two horny millennials, Gabi and Martin, listed as DTF in their social dating aps, meet up one night for some NSA fun. The sex is so hot, they accidentally fall in love. They’re both as pretty as they are restless so it’s a surprise to both of them that their one-night stand turns into a live-in relationship. This is unfamiliar territory amid their hookup culture and they have to invent games and rules to keep things interesting, but connecting is actually refreshing, and they’re intoxicated with that first blush of love. But as the newness fades, the lengths they’ll go to to keep things spicy become extreme.

Open relationships are not for everyone. I’m pretty okay about anything consensual that makes people happy and fulfilled, but let’s be honest: open relationships are hard to

Nicholas Hoult open relationship movie Newness

Um, no shit.

maintain. Also true: monogamous relationships are hard to maintain. Half of those end in divorce. Some people think they can solve the challenges of monogamy with polyamory and perhaps some are right. But if it’s difficult to make one person happy, it’s much harder juggling two or more.

Gabi and Martin are of a generation needing constant stimulus and feedback. They’ve gone from a phone full of potential lovers to one, single lover, night after night. At first it’s exhilarating to fall head over heels, but eventually monogamy starts to feel constrictive. Relying solely on each other to have their needs met becomes “boring.” So they open things up. Soon they’re swiping left and right harder than they ever did before. Does this save their relationship, or does a certain ugly green monster pay them a visit?

Laia Costa and Nicholas Hoult slide into their roles effortlessly. The camera is penetrating, the script languid. We get sucked down the rabbit hole of their relationship along with them. And you know what? Down there, it looks exactly the same as all relationships from the beginning of time. And it’s kind of dull. Director Drake Doremus doesn’t really have anything new to say. You don’t so much root for the characters as you root for their mistakes to catch up with them. Which is probably quite a bad sign, in retrospect.