Author Archives: Jay

Obvious Child

I hated the first 3 minutes of this film, and then loved the next 81.

Donna (Jenny Slate) is a confessional comic; she spills the dirty details of her life to a small audience in the back room of a dingy place. Not everyone in her life can handle being the subject of her standup, and the truth is, I could barely tolerate it myself. It was the usual stuff: I have a vagina, I’m Jewish, etc etc. But. But when she leaves the stage, she’s enormously funny. You get the sense that her stand-up will in fact take off one day, maybe even one day soon.

But not today. Because today she’s been “dumped up with” and she’s drinking and she’s oversharing, which is the only kind of sharing she knows how to do. With a microphone and a whine. And like, 17 shots. Cut to: drunken one-night stand, which leads to pregnancy, which leads to an abortion.

But a funny abortion! Okay, it’s not so funny. It’s actually dealt with pretty realistically, but with the kind of wit and truth that bathes the subject in a new light. Refreshingly unapologetic. And oddly becomes something of a romantic comedy, because who doesn’t take a date to the abortion clinic on Valentine’s Day? And P.S. – if you do, do you bring flowers?

I really like Slate on the Kroll Show, and director Gillian Robespierre knew she had the chops to handle a title role. Donna is a sometimes exasperating character but Slate pulls it off and is magnetic in every scene, whether petulant, snarky, or earnest.

I jotted down so many brilliant lines, all worth quoting, but I’m refraining for your sake, so that you may enjoy them from the right voice. But there are also fart jokes, which have no business even existing. So this is not a perfect film, but I was really won over by it. I’ll take the lows with the highs. I was charmed by Obvious Child, even if there was very little obvious about it. And I expect big and bigger things from both Robespierre and Slate in the future.

Railway Man

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Meet Colin Firth. Actually, for the next 108 minutes, you can call him Eric Lomax. He likes trains. He uses his vast train knowledge to woo women. On trains. He’s a man after Matt’s own heart. Matt likes trains. But wait! Just when you think you know where this movie is going, it turns from a movie about a guy who loves trains “a train enthusiast” he calls himself, into Unbroken, with slightly more trains.

Like Unbroken, Railway Man is based on a true story. Unlike it, this guy turns out to be pretty broken (although if we’re being honest, so did the guy in Unbroken…yes, they’re very brave during the war, but they go home really sick and deal with their crap for the rest of their lives). During the rest of Lomax’s life, he failed to really deal with the flashbacks and the PTSD symptoms so when he meets Nicole Kidman (call her Patti) and marries her in quick succession, she’s pretty surprised by his violent dreams and his sobs and his emotional distance. He won’t talk about what’s happened to him, but whatever it is, it’s killing him. Patti goes to his friend and fellow vet to hear the story – how they were captured and lived in a Japanese camp as slaves, building their railway under horrid conditions. Lomax was singled out for all kinds of abuse, and it turns out that all these years later, his captor and abuser is still alive.

The abuse we witness through flashbacks is disturbing and disgusting, but it’s also presented to us in a rather understated fashion. Because the movie is halved by into two time periods, “during the war” and “after”, we don’t get much (or enough) of either. It turns out be so similar to Unbroken (which I saw first, though this one preceded it in theatres) that it’s basically just the British version – with trains (sorry, couldn’t resist).

The Good Lie

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I have read and watched as much as I could about the Lost Boys – their story, though beginning in such tragedy, usually ends in quiet triumph but you never stop marvelling at it. One of my favourite books about the subject is called What Is The What by Dave Eggers, but if you’re more of a watcher than a reader, I think The Good Lie is faithfully rendered (by Canadian director Philippe Falardeau) and really quite moving.

It follows 5 of the Lost Boys (one actually a girl) who watched their parents, their village, and millions of their fellow Sudanese be slaughtered (though the movie goes a little “light” on these atrocities). Displaced from their homes, these orphaned children walked for hundreds of miles to reach a refugee camp where they grew up in temporary shelters wearing Americans’ cast-offs. After 13 years in camp, this group, now in their early 20s, are fortunate enough to land on one of the last flights to American (these flights dried up after 9\11).

Once in Kansas City, you can imagine that there is culture shock and a certain amount of homesickness. Reese Witherspoon eventually appears to help them find employment (a condition of their refugee status). Although technically billed a Reese movie to appeal to Western audiences, she’s in a supporting role. She is not there as a white saviour, but as a witness and sometime facilitator who can’t save them, but can certainly root for them as they save themselves. The actors portraying the Lost Boys are actual Sudanese refugees and what they lack in experience they make up for in earnestness.

This movie seems like one you ‘should’ see but it’s not a chore, it’s actually a really uplifting and heart-rending trip to Africa that you can make from the comfort of your own couch with a surprising amount of light-heartedness about it (ie, Matt kept shooting me weird, judgy looks every time I giggled). It’s actually one you’ll want to see and be glad you did.

Finding Vivian Maier

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In 2007, real estate agent John Maloof acquired some negatives through the auction of an abandoned storage-locker. He was putting together a book on his Chicago neighbourhood and quickly realized these photos were irrelevant to his project, but he kept coming back to them because they were simply beautiful.

He has since bought up all of her work that he could, and attributed the photos to Vivian Maier, a woman almost impossible to nail down because that’s the way she wanted it. Intensely private, she spent her life working as a Nanny, faking a french accent, occasionally posing as a spy, and always, always, taking pictures. These pictures, over 100 000 went largely undeveloped and her work unknown. It wasn’t until after her death in 2009 that Maloof started soliciting attention for her photographs, and now she’s a street photography or significant interest.

This documentary seeks out the personality behind the photos but finds that Vivian Maier may have prefered to remain anonymous. We get conflicting reports from the children she helped bring up, the parents she worked for, the neighbours she shunned, and the only thing that everyone agrees on is that she didn’t want to be known, and probably would have hated the very idea of this documentary.

Her pictures are indeed worth all the fuss. You get the sense that Maloof is profiting quite handsomely from them, and that makes you sad for the woman who apparently died in destitution. You wonder who would go to the trouble of taking so very many photos if she never intended to show them to anyone, but we never know the answer. Vivian Maier remains unfound.

Dear White People

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This movie tackles race in the microcosm of an ivy league college. The film focuses on four black characters as they live and learn on a predominantly white campus. One of them, Sam, uses her radio show to point out the racist sins of her fellow students – “Dear white people: The minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, but your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

It is by no means a perfect movie but it does spark a very important conversation, and you may have noticed by now that one of my barometers for a “good” movie is one that provokes a discussion. The film fearlessly points out the prejudice not just of the white students, but of the black students even toward each other. It’s a real meditation on what racism means in American in 2014 and culminates in a big party where white kids are encouraged to “liberate their inner Negro” and boy do they. This is satire and not satire because of course these events have actually taken place on many real campuses, not 50 years ago, but maybe 50 days ago.

Recently, Benedict Cumberbatch has had to apologize for using the term “coloured” in an interview. He immediately took responsibility for his mistake, but this too has opened up the debate. What he actually said was: “I think as far as coloured actors go, it gets really different in the UK, and a lot of my friends have had more opportunities here [in America] than in the UK, and that’s something that needs to change.” His terminology is outdated and offensive, at least to some. But it also highlights the fact that we still, as a society, don’t know the right answer here – because Cumberbatch wasn’t meaning to offend. Dear White People uses the term “coloured” a couple of times, actually, and that may add to our confusion.

At the end of the day, Cumberbatch’s assessment IS correct: Idris Elba, Thandie Newton, David Oyelowo, and Chiwetel Ejiofor have all had more success in the American market. David Oyelowo in particular has just this year appeared in Interstellar, Selma, and A Most Violent Year. The small part he played in Interstellar was not a “black” part, and that’s a step in the right direction. Now we just need about 100 more steps, because the #OscarsSoWhite problem doesn’t start at the Oscars, it ends there (note: Cumberbatch is nominated for best actor for his work in The Imitation Game while Oyelowo was overlooked for his brilliant performance in Selma). The problem begins on casting couches. There isn’t enough diversity on any screen (big or small) and David Oyelowo, coming to Cumberbatch’s defense, said that there was “absolutely” an issue with diversity within the film industry, which Cumberbatch was decrying. And while language is definitely something we should continue to re-evaluate, it’s only one part of the bigger picture. That’s why films like Dear White People are so important, and why Hollywood serves as a scapegoat for society. This stuff still makes us uncomfortable. We don’t always know how to talk about it. But I hope that at the very least, we can all agree that we must keep talking. And it proves why movies like Dear White People have value: as a white person, I want very much to be an ally, but clearly our good intentions need to be steered. I don’t know what the answers are, but this movie helped ignite conversation, and it’s clear that white people need to shut up and do some serious listening.

John Wick

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John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has a dead wife and a cool car. That much we can all agree on. The freshly dead wife has sent him a gift posthumously (dear movies: can we stop with the deliveries from beyond the grave now? it creeps me out) – a puppy to help him grieve. Wick’s initially not much of a fan of Daisy, but when he spends the day with her, cruising around in his cool car, they bond. But then something terrible happens: he runs out of gas. And we all know what happens when we stop to pump gas – we run into Russian mobsters. Okay, well, that hardly ever happens to me, but I gas up at Canadian Tire. But Keanu stopped at Shell or some such, and so of course his life is threatened when he refuses to sell his car for no apparent reason – and his little dog too.

Russian mobsters are infamous for not taking no for an answer, so they follow him home and wage a sneak attack when he’s sleeping to steal his car and kick his dog. Poor Daisy dies in the attack, and that dead dog is the impetus for all that unfolds next.

The dog was apparently the last shred of his old life that was holding him together. Turns out he used to be a bad dude, as evidenced by the arsenal he digs up from his basement. He learns that the kid who killed his dog is actually the son of his old boss, head of Russian mob. The mob guy learns that John Wick, his most accomplished assassin, is coming out of retirement on behalf of his dead dog, gunning for his only son, and freaks out. There’s a $4 million bounty on John’s head, which he deals with by checking into some sort of hit-man hotel where apparently you’re not allowed to kill people, but that’s assuming that criminals can follow the rules, which we all know they can’t.

And that’s where I lost the thread. It’s just pretty much plotless revenge-fuelled action movie after that, constant movement, lots of shattered glass. Body count: 119, 78 by Keanu’s hand. It doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but I’m pretty positive that if you like watching people kill for karma, cash, or just plain bloodlust, you’re going to want to see this movie.

The Best of Sundance 2015

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The Sundance Film Festival has been crazy busy this year, and tonnes of great movies have already debuted (and many bought for distribution!). Here’s a short list of some of the most-talked-about and highly anticipated movies to come out of the festival so far.

The Hunting Ground , a documentary by Kirby Dick who also did Invisible War a couple of years ago. The Hunting Ground is a powerfully charged film about rape on college campuses, a timely topic (sadly) that had audiences gasping audibly at the mockery of universities’ investigations into sexual assault. The film takes a hard look at fraternity culture, and also serves as a warning to the NFL about Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston – accused of rape he has yet to be formally charged but his accuser speaks out publicly for the first time, and it’s chilling. This movie also features the most talked about song at Sundance this year, Lady Gaga’s “Til It Happens To You”, co-written by the esteemed and venerable Diane Warren. The Hunting Ground is slated for release March 20 and will air later this year on CNN.

Going Clear is another documentary of note this year, this one directed by Alex Gibney (who you may remember from Taxi to the Dark Side). This one’s about Scientology and you can bet it’s ruffling plenty of feathers (HBO famously hired 160 lawyers to vet the thing). Gibney’s got lots of former scientologists on deck, including disillusioned former leaders, delivering first-hand accounts of what it’s really like behind closed doors. This doc lands bombshells about the torture of members in a prison known as “the hole”, the harassment of those who have left, and the intentional breaking up of Tom Cruise’s marriage to Nicole Kidman (and even wire-tapping her phones). Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief airs March 16 on HBO.

IFC Films laid out $3 million for the rights to Jack Black’s new comedy, The D Train, where he plays a loser who tries to save his high school reunion by recruiting the class’s favourite and most famous student (James Marsden), an actor in a successful Banana Boat commercial, to attend.

Brooklyn looks like another one to look out for – a romantic drama based on a best-selling book (by Colm Toibin) with a screenplay adaptation by Nick Hornby. If memory serves correctly, it’s about a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn and faces homesickness and heartbreak as she chooses between 2 men and 2 countries. Something like that. 🙂

The End of The Tour sounds a little like Almost Famous but for book worms as opposed to groupies. It follows Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg, who I’m a little wary of at this point) on a five-day road trip with David Foster Wallace (brought to the big screen by Jason Segel). Wallace committed suicide a few years back and apparently his family aren’t pleased about the movie, so it’s sure to create some chatter when released later this year.

I am not sure, though, that anything will create quite as much controversy as James Franco’s new movie, I Am Michael, based on the life of gay activist Michael Glatze who co-founded an LGBT teen magazine only to renounce his sexuality and become a Christian pastor. Zachary Quinto and Emma Watson also star.

For those of you worried about having too much fun at the movies this year, here’s one that’s sure to be a downer: in Stockholm, Pennsylvania, Saoirse Ronan plays a young woman who was kidnapped as a young child and held captive for 17 years. Recently returned home to her family, she must now reconcile her haunting past with the reality of parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) who are pretty much strangers, and a world she didn’t know existed.

And if you’re in the mood for a couple of chuckle-heads turned dramatic, Jonah Hill slips on his serious glasses to play Michael Finkel, a disgraced journalist who learns an obsessive murderer (James Franco) captured in Mexico is stealing his identity. Finkel travels to interview the prisoner in hopes of restoring his integrity. True Story has a limited release set for April 10.

Which ones are you most excited to see?

Women in Hollywood

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Russell Crowe is an ass. Everyone knows this. So when he recently went on a rant about how there are plenty of parts for women in movies so they should just shut their yaps and “act their age” no one was surprised by the medium or the message. As long as there’s been movies, there’s been sexism and by god, where sexism goes so does ageism.

Looking at this year’s Oscar nominations it was pretty clear to me that meatier roles go to men, but I’m not going to sit here and lament the missed opportunities when instead I could be celebrating the success.

Earlier today, Paul Feig posted an untitled photo to Twitter featuring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. Feig provided absolutely no comment but fans were quick to speculate that this was the cast of his much-discussed reboot of The Ghostbusters franchise. McKinnon and Jones are both current members of SNL while Wiig and McCarthy are already Feig collaborators, having co-starred in Bridesmaids, the highest grossing domestic R-rated female comedy of all time, edging out Sex and the City (2008).

Meanwhile, at Sundance, Emily Nussbaum, award-winning critic for the New Yorker, moderated a panel of “Serious Ladies” featuring the uber-talented Wiig, Jenji Kohan (who wrote for Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls before creating Orange Is the New Black and Weeds), Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls) and Mindy Kaling (writer\producer\star of The Mindy Project). Although they’re all at the top of their game, they all shared stories about how tough it was to break in. Kohan recalled male-dominated writers’ rooms where one cave-dweller told her “If God had meant women to be in a writer’s room he wouldn’t have made breasts so distracting.” Kaling discussed the pressure to be a role-model versus the artist’s craving to push the envelope and maybe even offend. Sometimes feminism means creating a female character that isn’t necessarily “likeable.”

Dunham, who recently released a memoir, spoke about the difficulty women face in being mistaken for the characters they play (and wondered why Woody Allen and Larry David don’t get pigeonholed in quite the same way). She hopes to one day see women outnumber men in their profession – “That would be my favourite, if guys some day were to say, ‘It’s impossible to get into Hollywood! It’s a women’s club!’ ”

Jenji Kohan pointed out that she was still expected to write material about weddings and motherhood, a notion she challenges with the huge success of her show, Orange Is The New Black. That series, a Netflix original, won big at the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday. Uzo Aduba took home Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series that night (she plays “Crazy Eyes), and gave a heartfelt speech. But the best part was the love and support coming from the OITNB table – it’s always heartening to see women cheering each other on. Aduba was back on stage before long – the show also won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, wrestling away the honour from Modern Family. What a great sight to see so many strong and talented ladies on the stage at once.

There are still mountains to climb for women in Hollywood, but if you look around (or follow our Twitter feed – @assholemovies ) you’ll find brave mountaineers everywhere. Just today it was announced that Toy Story 4 would be making its way to theatres in 2017 and that Rashida Jones and her writing partner Will McCormack would be tapped for the screenplay. Although they only have one previous credit to their names (Celeste and Jesse Forever), John Lasseter insists he “wanted to get a strong female voice in the writing of this.” This is a nice change from Pixar’s usually male-dominated animated lineup (Buzz, Woody, Nemo, Mike, Sully, Wall-E, etc) and a step in the right direction for us all.

Fury

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Another WW2 movie released in 2014 – see my reviews of Unbroken and The Monuments Men – that didn’t get a whole lot of attention. Is it possible the American film-going population is finally sick of movies about old wars? None of these movies is great but neither are they bad, which to my mind place them above American Sniper, which showcases a more recent war effort but also glorifies it.

Fury is about a tank crew in the final days of the war. Brad Pitt plays “Wardaddy”, an aging staff sergeant to a veteran crew: “Bible” (Shia LeBoeuf), “Coon-Ass” (Jon Bernthal), and “Gordo” (Michael Pena), who credit him with keeping them all alive. They’ve recently lost their fifth man so newbie Norman (Logan Lerman), a typist who’s never seen the inside of a tank let alone the ravages of war is drafted to join the gang. Pitt’s in charge of his tank, nicknamed Fury, but it’s obvious that the fury also comes from inside him. He’s angry at what he’s seen and takes comfort in abusing prisoners and killing Nazis. He counsels young Norman to do the same, but Norman doesn’t think killing prisoners is “right” and refuses.

After discussing the moral relativism inherent in A Most Violent Year, this movie had me thinking more along the lines of righteousness, and whether those ideals apply to wartime at all. The film does a brutally stirring job of showing good Nazis, bad Allies, sympathetic Germans, ignorant Americans, and everything in between. THIS is truth. This isn’t Clint Eastwood’s fanatical fanboy version of war, this is the real and harsh and horrid. One man may be both hero and monster. Both sides believe in what they are doing. Everyone’s afraid.

Director David Ayer put his actors through a controversial process, starting with boot camp, but also forcing them to live together in the tank, encouraging them to fight each other physically on set, and hurl verbal abuse at each other, while swearing them all to absolute secrecy. Shia LeBoeuf, never a stranger to controversy himself, took things a step further, pulling out his own tooth, cutting himself repeatedly, and refusing to shower for the duration of the shoot.

Did all of this make for a better movie? Certainly the tank stands in for their “home” and the crew as their “family”, with all the dysfunction and closeness and claustrophobia that brings. The violence is relentless. The tension is gut-clenching. But it’s the middle act that stabbed at me – how the Greatest Generation is merciful and merciless at war. Unfortunately, we get a little glimpse of anyone’s life pre- (or post) war and the characters feel a little one-note. Brad Pitt, kind of old to be a non-commissioned officer at this point, may also be a WW1 veteran, but in Fury, nothing outside the tank matters – or maybe they’ve just been at it so long they’ve forgotten who they used to be. Watching them go from one act of savagery to the next, it’s easy to believe that whoever they once were, they aren’t anymore. When we sent these men home (if they made it home at all), they were changed.

Available on DVD and Blu-Ray today.

Before I Go To Sleep

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Nicole Kidman plays a woman who wakes up peacefully in bed with her husband (Colin Firth), only she has no memory of him, or how she got there, or, come to think of it, of the past several years. Turns out, she’s had an accident that stops her from making any new memories, so every time she sleeps, she wipes out the day before and wakes up a stranger in her own body.

The most embarrassing thing about this movie is that I’d forgotten I’d already seen it. It’s bad news to watch a movie about an amnesiac and not realize you’re actually rewatching it.

Anyway, it sounds, on paper, a lot like 50 First Dates, except things aren’t as rosy for Nicole as they were for Drew. There are holes in her story that even someone with a brain injury can see through, so there’s a little Momento mixed in, just for fun. A mysterious doctor and a friend from her past show up to help her solve the question mark, but she can’t be sure who to trust, and neither can you. The brain trauma thing is kind of overused for such a rare disease, but it does put the viewer on equal footing with our poor, disoriented heroine. Her confusion makes for an unreliable narrator if ever there was one and so the who-dunnit unravels in darkness for her like it does for us.

The genre is tired and this one’s not adding much to the mix. It feels like it’s taken a page from Gone Girl, but lacks Fincher’s balls with the follow-through. The story demands more of our attention while actually deserving less. It does silly, unforgivable things like using the old “I have something important to tell you, but not over the phone!” and even worse, the old, “I’m being attacked and fear for my life but won’t yell for help.” Plus, director Rowan Joffe has these little tells, like constantly showing us a close-up of Kidman’s blood-shot eyes, that get annoying real quick. It’s a thriller that’s so banal and (ironically) forgettable, I accidentally watched it twice.