Author Archives: Jay

Bridget Jones’s Baby

My biggest problem with the Bridget Jones series has always been with Bridget herself. I find her a bit insufferable. She’s whiny and vacuous and quite self-absorbed. I think she’s supposed to be relatable, but I always find her an insult to women everywhere. However, with both of my dreamboats Colin Firth and Hugh Grant on board, I couldn’t help but succumb to Bridget and her wanton ways.

In this newest incarnation, Hugh Grant is dead, and his cavernously- bridget-jones-gallery-01 inadequate replacement is Patrick Dumpsey. I am very firmly NOT aboard the McDreamy train. I am on the station platform, eyebrow cocked, arms crossed, unamused ember in my eye, willing it to just get on with it already. Good riddance. The only thing I’ve known him from is Can’t Buy Me Love, and I’ve not been induced to rectify that. Still, I was unprepared for how astoundingly bad Dumpsey is in Bridget Jones’s Baby. Dear god. He’s really, really bad.

Bridget Jones, luckily, is a little more tolerable. Older now, she’s less obsessive about her weight (though this might be attributed to Renee Zellweger’s refusal to gain weight for the role), and accordingly more focused on her age. But 15-bridget-jones-baby_w529_h352 she’s also got a nice social life and a good job, so she feels more well-rounded and less pathetic. Well done, feminism! And she isn’t whining and pining over two men, either. This time she’s chosen both, laid them both, and wound up pregnant. Who’s the daddy?

In a way it doesn’t matter. Bridget is 43 now, and more mature. She’s not man-hunting, she’s content to be by herself, to parent by herself. This message isn’t exactly served by the love fantasy it constantly alludes to. Firth’s character, actually called “Mr. Darcy” is every bit the prototypical Pride & Prejudice hero. Dumpsey gets a Cinderella storyline and does his best Prince Charming impression. Austen vs Disney: who would you choose? Bridget is as maddeningly flip-floppy as ever, but never mind. The real love story here is between Bridget and her baby, which is possibly the first thing this trilogy really gets right.

TIFF: All I See Is You

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All I See Is You is a movie I wish I could unsee.

Blake Lively plays a woman blinded in a childhood accident. Her husband dotes on her, and in the first few scenes of the movie, director Marc Forster wants to experience her perceptions. Film is of course a visual medium, but as she and her husband have sex, we focus on different sensations – on the all-i-see-is-you-review-blake-lively sheets, on his hands, their breathing, the sounds drifting in from outside, the memories that keep cropping up. It’s a strong enough start but when she becomes a candidate for surgery that would restore her eyesight, things start to shift.

The story shifts. It’s not just her life that changes as a seeing woman, but his as well. Both struggle to redefine themselves. But now that her vision is restored, I found the film harder to follow. In fact, I didn’t follow it. Afterward, momentarily blinded by the sun upon exiting the dark theatre, Sean and I compared notes and found that neither of us could account for some strange occurrences in the movie. I was willing to believe that I was just tired and bored and inattentive, but since both of us failed I’m more inclined to blame it on bad film making.

As Blake’s vision begins to focus, she sees cracks in her marriage. Neither she nor her husband (Jason Clarke) could have anticipated the cobwebs they’d find in the corners of their relationship. And as much as she’s maybe not digging the dynamic in her marriage, she’s definitely into what she sees in the mirror! A dye job and a push-up bra are top priorities, and I’m sure her corneal transplant surgeon (Danny Huston) feels very gratified. The film continues to present images that are a little surreal, paired with incongruous sound that represent the disparity in her experience. Some of it is a little too obvious and some of it’s way out of left field. Like if you take a left at the hot dog cart behind left field, keep going pass the overflowing garbage can with all the bees buzzing around it, and head for the 3rd red Buick in the parking lot, that’s maybe where this stuff came from. And that’s me being generous because in my hard little heart I still believe some of this stuff was slotted in just to see if we were paying attention.

Her husband definitely prefers her submissive and dependent, and things crumble when she’s suddenly strutting her hot stuff all by her lonesome. But I can’t quite feel a lot of empathy such a vain and selfish character. There’s nobody here to root for, not even the dead bird stuffed mysteriously down a glass bottle in the refrigerator (?). I don’t think there is any saving this movie, but Lively definitely doesn’t have the chops for it. If I’d had an inkling that Sean was finding All I See Is You just as painful as I was, I would have organized a walk-out.

TIFF: Arrival

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Arrival is exactly the kind of sci-fi film I’ve been waiting for all my life.

There are no guns, no star wars, no green men, no space cowboys, no mutually-assured destruction. The aliens touch down, and we’re not sure what their intentions are. Do we fire lasers at them? No. We study them. We gather together top academics, and we attempt to learn, peacefully (with the army on speed dial, just in case).

Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks. Of all the people on Earth talking to arrival-movie-1-600x399 aliens, she’s the one who listens well enough to actually crack the code. And it’s a hell of a code, unlike anything our puny human brains can really comprehend. This deep gulf of understanding makes plenty of people nervous – people with their fingers hovering over big red buttons. Annihilation-type buttons. Dr. Banks puts her own life at risk to keep things from escalating to an out-and-out global (universal? galaxal?) war.

Amy Adams is as good at playing Dr. Banks as Dr. Banks is at solving language problems. Both are beautiful to watch. Director Denis Villeneuve worked doggedly to make sure all the science is sound, but it’s also almost magical. It makes me want to call it the movie Interstellar aspired to be: rooted in science, hinging on human connection.

Arrival is the most intimate of sci-fi films, the aliens (if that’s what they are) almost incidental to humanity’s expanding comprehension of time and memory. It’s like poetry. And it doesn’t hurt one bit that visually, it’s slick as hell. Bradford Young’s cinematography is nearly stark, but it is absolutely arrival2 arresting. It works in synchronicity with a hauntingly beautiful score by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Twinned together they remind you that though the plot feels startlingly realistic for a sci-fi film, there’s something otherworldly at play. Young’s work is atmospheric, Jóhannsson’s is pulsating.

It’s refreshing to have an alien encounter that relies on communication rather than violence, and to have a woman stepping in as Hero(ine) feels only natural. In fact, the only part of the movie that didn’t gel for me is a 2-minute montage that serves to pilot the plot further ahead and is narrated by Ian (Jeremy Renner). The rest of the story is told completely through the eyes of Louise, so to have her voice suspended during these few scenes is jarring and emotionally blunting.

Adams, though, is faultless; she turns out a character that is mature and complex, and I won’t be one bit surprised to see her name alongside Natalie Portman’s, and likely Emma Stone’s, come Oscar time.

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe

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Mongolian border, 1979: soldiers are exhausting themselves digging a mine, but damn do they believe in the cause. They believe it so hard they break into song when they’re not collapsing of altitude sickness. Is this a propaganda movie? Wait: a rumble. Our hero, Hu Bayi, turns toward the tunnel in time to get hit by the force of an explosion, an explosion seemingly caused by the recent unearthing of gigantic fossils.

Many are dead, but the explosion has opened up enormous caves that lead down into previously unknown parts of the mountain. What are the fossils? What secrets does the mountain possess? A brave few volunteer: Hu Bayi (Mark Chao) of course, the venerable Professor Yang (Wang Qingxiang), and the professor’s beautiful daughter, Ping (Yao Chen).

The expedition encounters a footprint of enormous proportions. They haven’t seen yet what we’ve seen: a dragon or dinosaur or big reptilian animal of some sort. Yikes. They march on, tracking the prints, when a flock of pink bats suddenly attack. The bats can change colour, and dodge bullets, and also dive into humans and incinerate them from the inside out.

With fewer and fewer survivors, the stakes get higher, the surroundings more treacherous and the CGI more ludicrous. Slo-mo avalanche deaths? You betcha. Super slo-mo avalanche deaths? Why the hell not.

And that’s when things start to get super messed up. When they stumble upon a temple, they open up a portal the releases…well, I’ll call them hell bats for the sake of argument. We can debate the semantics later. Net result: Hu is the only one left standing. Years later, present day: Hu lives in NYC and spends his time studying demonology. And this is when shit gets EVEN MORE MESSED UP.

Directed by Chuan Lu, Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (Jiu ceng yao taIt) feels like the genetically modified bastard child of Indiana Jones and X-Men Apocalypse, only without the budget. Asia doesn’t really do sci-fi the way we understand it, but they do love the supernatural and they love love love a monster movie. Put them together, subtract reason and logic, multiply by two hours of subtitles and what do you get? A movie I regret watching.

TIFF: Brimstone

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Something has to bear the banner of “bloodiest thing I saw at TIFF” and I’d wager that Brimstone bears it proudly, has indeed gone to great lengths to earn it.

Dakota Fanning plays a mute woman newly married, raising a dead woman’s son and a daughter of her own. She is unable to speak but the look of dread on her face when she hears the new preacher’s voice tells us all we need to know. That preacher (Guy Pearce) has been stalking her for years, and bathing villages in blood as he attempts to make her his.

Their story unravels backwards – chapter one sets the above scene; chapter two rewinds to her childhood in a religious-pioneer settlement when her mother was the object of his cruel “affections”; chapter three follows her to a saloon where she does what she must in order to escape; chapter four has him caught up to her, and to her kids, as she flees through snowy, barren land.

Guy Pearce is diabolical – the extent of his character’s actual super-naturalness is unclear, or up for debate, but he’s a twisted zealot AT BEST and I’ll let you decide if there’s more to it. Dakota Fanning as Liz is necessarily quiet but full of strength and grit. He comes at her hard with vengeance but she’s a surprisingly formidable opponent.

This is Martin Koolhoven’s first English-language movie and he’s determined to show us what he’s made of. And for the record: blood and guts. He’s made of blood and guts. So am I, I suppose, but I’ve never worn my intestines as a scarf. Have you?

The images are powerful, and will burrow under your skin. And there are 148 bloody minutes of them. It’s not all gore though, there’s plenty of foreboding, plenty of tension. The setting does a lot to add to it: isolation is nobody’s friend. The land is unforgiving.

The MPAA warns of brutal bloody violence, strong sexual content including disturbing behavior, graphic nudity, and language. That doesn’t really tell a story though, does it? And it certainly doesn’t account for how thoroughly you’ll scour yourself in the shower after watching it. There’s no label for that. Except maybe “A film by Martin Koolhoven.”

TIFF: Blue Jay

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For 16 glorious hours, Blue Jay was my favourite movie at TIFF. Then I watched La La Land and I was in cinematic, technicolour heaven. I’ll tell anyone who will listen every single day of my life that I’m a lucky, lucky girl. Getting to watch 2 astounding, knock-your-socks-off films? Frosting on my fucking cupcake.

Blue Jay is nearly an anti-La La Land. It’s a small, quiet, black and white film that’s not destined for the Oscars, or even really theatres (a small run in LA and NY, and then Netflix by the end of the year – lucky us!). But it is superb.

bluejay_03-h_2016 It stars Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson, almost exclusively. They play high school sweethearts who bump into each other 20 years later. Agony and ecstasy, right there on the screen. And heaping spoonfuls of awkwardness, don’t forget that. Because they were in luuuuurv. The real deal. And now they don’t even know each other. It reminded me of a friend who had recently posted on Facebook that it was her ex-husband’s birthday, a date she can’t help but remember even if she no longer even knows if he’s alive. Isn’t it weird that we can lose track of people who used to be our whole worlds?

For Jim and Amanda (Duplass and Paulson), once they get over their initial weirdness, it’s almost like no time has elapsed at all. They’ve both moved on, new cities, big jobs, other lovers. And yet they can pick up where they left off, the magic reappearing in an instant. It’s like opening up a dorky little hole into time and space, hurtling these two pushing-40-year-olds back to their glory days in high school, when things were light and fun, the caa09d60-5f6f-0134-3e92-0ad17316e277 sex was hot and heavy, and Annie Lennox was everything. Jim and Amanda will take you down your own worm hole, and if you don’t end the movie thinking about your own First Love, then you my friend have a cold, cold heart.

I picked this movie on two words alone: Mark Duplass. But Sarah Paulson is luminous; she fucking shoots starlight out of her face. The two together have incredible chemistry, and it’s obvious they work-shopped their characters together to perfection – the nostalgic backstory, their lovable eccentricities, the subtle hints to what caused their demise. Duplass and Paulson each deliver career-best performances. No kidding.

If you have ever loved and lost, this movie is for you. If you didn’t marry your high school sweetheart, this movie is for you. If you married him and left him, this movie is for you. If you appreciate things like smart dialogue, meticulous observation, authentic and vulnerable performances, and little bursts of spontaneity that are pure joy on celluloid, this movie is for you.

Oh fer fuck’s sake, just see it. It’s for everybody. It’s perfect.

ARQ

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ARQ had its world premiere at TIFF and was sufficiently popular that Sean and I tried but failed to get tickets. It’s a damn good thing we didn’t get them because if I had paid money to see this piece of shit, I’d be in a REAL rage right now, the likes of yet we’ve yet to see on Assholes Watching Movies.

It sounds promising on paper: a dystopian thriller meets sci-fi Groundhog Day. The protagonists, Renton and Hannah, keep waking up in bed when a bunch of bad guys burst in on them. Things don’t go well. But every time Renton gets shot in the face, they wake up in bed again, to do it all over, though not necessarily with better results.

The gimmick wore off cinematically long before it evaporated on screen. Even screwball Bill Murray cottoned on to the trick quicker than this guy. The bad guys are ostensibly there to steal scripts, but it’s soon evident that Renton’s invention, the ARQ, is much more valuable…and it’s inconveniently causing a time loop.

I mentioned before that we failed to get tickets. How then did we see it? It’s on Netflix. That’s right. Just a few days after making it’s $25-a-head, world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s airing on Netflix for free. Even at that low price, though, it arq_03 isn’t worth it. The dialogue put me off immediately. It has the look and feel of the kind of television show I would never watch. Even worse, it ends like it’s the pilot of a TV show that hopes to continue this mystery in vague and infuriating terms for the next 6 years. It isn’t, though. It genuinely believes itself to be a whole movie. Don’t believe it, not for a second: ARQ is to be avoided at all costs. Keep swiping left.

Looking for something more satisfying on Netflix? Try

The Wave

The Fundamentals of Caring

TIFF: Jackie

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Jackie is a beautiful film by Pablo Larrain that focuses on Jacqueline Kennedy in the minutes and days following her husband’s assassination.

Larrain is a Chilean film maker, which makes him at outsider to American politics. He poured over documents and was fascinated to read about this day that every age-appropriate American remembers so vividly: when the car turned, the location of the grassy knoll, the flag-wavers lining the street, the bullet’s trajectory – and always sitting beside the president, his wife, Jackie. e02adc223bf38b822b3e250330bde15c Larrain thought to himself, what if it was the other way around. What if he was sitting beside her? And in that thought was born a beautifully conceived film that puts its female character front and centre.

Larrain thought the script was good but sent it back with a note to cut every and any scene that she wasn’t in. The camera would be on Jackie the whole time. Obviously a film with such unerring focus would need an actress who could carry it, and Natalie Portman is that actress. This is her best role since Black Swan and honestly it may be her best role, full stop. She inhabits Jackie like a second skin. She doesn’t get caught up in the trappings of impersonation, she just embodies the grace, the thoughtfulness, and the mystery of one of America’s most beloved and glamourous first ladies.

Despite being a favourite in the press, Jacqueline Kennedy is perhaps unknowable. She was always careful about her public persona and was closely guarded when speaking on record. The film makes this abundantly clear through scenes with a journalist (Billy Crudup) about a week after tragedy has struck. She edits her remarks, strikes things from the record, and demands final approval before a single word is printed. Noah Oppenheim’s script is 14996 precise and offers up tantalizing looks behind the closed doors of Camelot.

Peter Sarsgaard, as Bobby Kennedy, is a charming lurker. Greta Gerwig in her most un-Gerwig role to date is restrained and almost unrecognizable. I’d heard that Natalie Portman gave a stellar performance in Jackie but I was unprepared for how good the film would be as a whole. This isn’t just a candidate for Best Actress but I believe, for Best Picture. It’s so well-orchestrated, each piece comes together perfectly to make a very satisfying picture. JFK, one of the world’s most recognizable politicians, is a mere shadow in this film. Jackie gets her moment in the sun, which makes Natalie Portman the star at the centre of this movie’s universe.

She deserves all the acclaim she’ll receive. She’s brave and courageous here, mixing grief and poise in an intoxicating cocktail that you won’t be able to tear your eyes from. She’s magnetic. She shimmers with loss and outrage as she protects her husband (and more importantly: his legacy) from the vultures already climbing over his coffin. Jackie feels very much like an insider’s peek-a-boo on what has to be an iconic yet little-understood moment in history. Finally we experience JFK’s assassination as Jackie felt it – as the gruesome murder of her husband and the father of her two young kids. She sat beside him, scooping his brains back into his skull, calling to him even as she knew he was already dead. His blood is still fresh on her dress as LBJ is sworn in just 43 minutes later, Kennedy’s body resting just a few feet away. What to tell the children? What to tell the nation? It’s absolutely fascinating. Stephane Fontaine’s cinematography allows us to get very close to the grief, while also appreciating its context: Air Force One, the White House, the Lincoln convertible. Jackie manages to be both historic and quite personal, and Larrain ushers us ably into both worlds. Both Portman and Larrain resist the temptation to over-emote. Like the former first lady herself, restraint, control, and self-possession are at its heart.

TIFF: The Promise

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History is written by the victors. Turkey has denied – or worse, refused to acknowledge at all – the Ottoman empire’s systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians. What better way to commemorate a genocide than with a bland and basic love triangle, amirite?

I don’t want to make light of this sad historical time, but I feel like that’s what this romantic epic does. Jeez Louise I feel dirty even writing that, and yet here we are.

THE PROMISE

It’s 1914. An Armenian druggist, Michael (Oscar Isaac), gets engaged to local girl Maral in order to afford medical school. Off he goes to Constantinople where a)he promptly falls in love with the beautiful Ana (Charlotte Le Bon) who’s of course already attached to a journalist, Chris (Christian Bale) and b)Turkey starts slaughtered Armenians, forcing both Ana and Michael to run for their lives.

This is the first big Hollywood film to be made about this atrocity, and it took years to get it made. It was financed by Kirk Kerkorian, whose family survived the genocide. To get The Promise just right, he brought in powerhouse writer, Robin Swicord (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Memoirs of a Geisha) and director Terry George (Reservation Road, Hotel Rwanda) and together they managed to water down a very powerful story in order to broaden its appeal. The genocide becomes the backdrop to a love story, and not a very compelling one. Even love takes a backseat when survival is at stake. Plus, it puts the promise-03 viewer in an awkward position: in order to root for our two heroes to get together, Chris and Maral, who’ve done nothing wrong, will have to die. That seems excessive, doesn’t it?

It’s beautifully, lavishly shot, easily appreciated since the violence is somehow de-emphasized. You can almost see the compromises they’ve made – by aiming for a lower rating, they’ve effectively neutered the film. The acting, however, is its saving grace. All three put in amazing performances. Oscar Isaac has been so consistent lately, and here he even nails the accent.

Yes, it’s melodramatic. The music alone will convince you of that. But it’s a tolerable watch, and, I’d argue, an important one. Since little is known about this ugly chapter in the 20th century, our attention is overdue.

TIFF: The Levelling

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When her brother commits suicide, Clover does something she hasn’t done in ages: she goes home. ‘Home’ is a relative term – right now it’s the trailer beside a crumbling farmhouse damaged by floods where her surly father sleeps at night. Having just deeded the farm to his now-deceased son, her levelling_01 father is working at keeping what’s left of the farm running. Clover, meanwhile, is trying to piece together what would make her young, whole-life-ahead-of-him, brother put a gun to his head. Neither is mourning in a conventional way, and they’re certainly not doing it together.

The Levelling is somehow beautiful without trying to be. So is its star, Ellie Kendrick. There is strength and vulnerability to both. Shot on location in Somerset where floods actually did threaten farms, director Hope Dickson Leach was fascinated by the plight of farmers who invest so heavily in something so fickle as land. The Levelling, her first feature, is told from the stark perspective of people for whom life and death are matters of course. levelling_03 When death is part of business, part of the lifestyle, part of every day, what toll does it take, and at what remove do they experience more personal brushes with mortality?

Blunt emotions roil beneath a landscape of precise, economical film making. Dickson Leach keeps a cool, steady tone. Her lead, Ellie Kendrick, is perfectly distilled in her restrained performance, never boiling over in a role that could easily have been histrionic in less capable hands.

The Levelling had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, in its discovery section. Dickson Leach is in fact a discovery, and having discovered her, it will be just as important to keep an eye on her for great things to come.