Category Archives: Half-assed

Diary of a Mad Black Woman

I guess I keep thinking that if I watch this movie enough, I’ll finally understand it. I mean, I can follow the plot. It’s the tone that’s like monkeys throwing poop. It zooms between farce, romance, and drama. It’s from 2005 but feels a decade older. It uses and overuses montages and voice-overs to frost over the crumbly bits. And then it gets DARK.

A woman, Helen (Kimberly Elise) is thrown out of her home when her philandering husband finally gets tired of her after 18 years. The pre-nup says she gets nothing. Helen is broken but her grandmother is there to put her back together – the grandmother being played by Tyler Perry, of course, in his first appearance as the famous Madea.

Even if you’ve never seen a Madea movie, you know that she’s loud and proud. Of course she is. Perry is hamming it up for all he’s worth. He knew this was his chance to spawn himself a franchise, and he did. A whole empire, in fact.

Tyler Perry is a talented man. I don’t love Madea the way some do, but it is refreshing to see every day families and strong women taking centre stage. He writes what he knows. And Perry knows his audience too, an audience that Hollywood largely ignores. His movies routinely make $50M against a budget half that – it’s a rate of return you can’t ignore.

Madea has her roots in a series of plays that Tyler Perry wrote and staged across the country. They were filmed and available on video for years before he got to make a movie. But after a string of successes, on the big screen and the small, now he’s got carte blanche. Good for him. He circumvented obstacles by doing it all himself and never compromised a principle.

Free State of Jones

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Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) is a poor man fighting a rich man’s war, and he knows it. The rich men have cleverly saved themselves from war by enacting the 20 Negro Law, which exempts any man who owns 20 slaves. Nice loophole. Knight is less than pleased. When a very young recruit is gunned down beside him, he straps the body to a horse and sets off to return the boy to his mother for burial. The only problem is, this act stinks of desertion to everyone that matters.

Not content with hiding out, Knight (a real historical figure) instead founds free-state-of-jones the “free state of Jones”, made up of deserters, runaway slaves, and women, and they start their own mini rebellion against the corrupt Confederates in charge. The soldiers have been raiding local homes, taking their “10%” (more like 90), but leaving large plantations untouched. These people aren’t exactly hard to convince which side will benefit them most.

Free State of Jones is graphic from the get-go, but if you can survive the first two or three minutes, the worst of the gore is over. It helps to establish how bloody and senseless this war is (the civil war, if that’s not clear): no matter how perfectly rhythmic the marching, it doesn’t stop you from getting mowed down. Director Gary Ross also tries to give the film some context by intercutting the main story with courtroom snippets of a case against a man 1\8th negro, a coloured person in the eyes of the law, who thus is not allowed to be married to his white wife. I didn’t care for the splicing but came to appreciate it by the end.

This is absolutely a brilliant and worthy piece of history but it’s not quite done right by Free State of Jones. The movie’s well over 2 hours but feels as though it lollygags from scene to scene, dwelling in weird places, then rushing through others. Perhaps Ross has simply bitten off more than he can chew, but you can see his good intentions shine through. What we need, though, is passion. It’s sadly lacking here. Even McConaughey’s strong performance is muddied by the white saviour characterization: Knight was a much more divisive figure.

I enjoyed this movie but was frustrated by its limitations. I would have liked to have seen more of Rachel, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who I think is spectacular but criminally underused in this film. I wouldn’t stop anyone from watching Free State of Jones, but I am endeavouring to temper your expectations. The civil war has many stories to tell, but they aren’t just historical ones. There are a lot of modern consequences, enough to give you shivers.

Midnight in Paris

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Establishing shots at the beginning of the film are divine, and if I wasn’t in Paris already, I’d be booking my flight! Funny how the toast of Manhattan, consummate New Yorker Woody Allen, now seems to be smitten with Paris. Is the City of Light his new inspiration?

Owen Wilson is quite taken with Paris in the 1920s. He’s a writer who’s spent years grinding out scripts in Hollywood (successfully, it seems) but wishes he’d had the guts to write novels in Paris instead. He’s visiting the city with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams), who’s had enough (“If I never see another charming boulevard or bistro -) but he’s still bubbling with anecdotes of Monet and Hemingway and their fruitful time lost in their art. While he’s out chasing the ghost of Joyce down cobbled streets, the clock strikes midnight and an old Peugeot drives up, full of merry-makers. Turns out – spoiler alert – that it’s Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

We never know whether this is magic or mental health, but he now possesses the ability to slip back to his favourite time period, 20s era Paris, and he gets invited into Gertrude Stein’s (Kathy Bates) famous salon. Bates is lovely but I have to say, Wilson’s earnestness is what really sells this piece. He’s wide-eyed and worshipful of his heroes. It’s major wish-fulfillment and it’s fun to see all these giants come to life.

Rachel McAdams starts to get annoyed that he disappears every night, but how can he resist? Hemingway himself has offered to edit his work! Woody Allen’s script sings with treasures for book-lovers, and in this film, I can combine with my love of literature AND film (AND Paris, incidentally). Owen Wilson is just as bowled over – particularly when he comes across a beautiful muse (and mistress) to many famous artists (Marion Cotillard), but what a conflict between his actual fiancée in the present tense, and the people who get him but may just be figments of his fertile imagination.

This movie is not for everyone and that’s okay. And it’s not just about being well-read. You just either feel the charm or you don’t. Allen sprinkles the scrip liberally with treats that add up to a veritable feast (a moveable feast?) – you get the sense that he must have had fun writing this, which is perhaps why he won the Oscar for Best Orignal Screenplay (though he never attends to pick up his statuettes). If any of the above has sounded interesting, or if you just need another excuse to fall in love with the City of Possibility, then put this on your list.

101 Dalmatians (1996)

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Pongo the highly intelligent dalmatian is not just Roger’s best friend, he’s his alarm clock, personal assistant, and milkman. Roger is a video game developer but no one’s interested in his dalmatian game because it lacks a proper villain, a desire to annihilate.

Meanwhile, at the House of DeVil, Cruella (Glenn Close) runs a fashion empire and her look would makes Miranda Priestley look like a schlub; indeed, the devil wears DeVil. Anita (Joely Richardson), owner of Perdita, and one of Cruella’s top designers, attracts Cruella’s attention and inspires a spotted fur coat that has her boss salivating for the soft fur coats of dalmatian puppies. Unbeknownst to Anita, Cruella will stop at nothing to get her hands on the real thing. And thanks to a mutual swim in a park pond, Anita and Roger meet, and their dogs fall in love. So do they of course, and after a double wedding comes a double pregnancy (perhaps it’s lucky that Cruella only covets the skins of puppies and not babies).

Fifteen puppies come, and Cruella shows up with a cheque and a sac before Perdita’s even licked them clean. Not liking the wild glint in her eye, Anita and Roger refuse to sell them to her in a true moment of no fucking kidding.

Cruella kidnaps them anyway of course and only a strange network of animals can get them back.

Over 200 dalmatian puppies were trained for this film, and 20 adult dogs as well, some of them truly frightened of Glenn Close in full costume, hair, and makeup. I don’t know how costume designers Rosemary Burrows and Anthony Powell failed to score an Oscar nomination for their wondrous, over the top looks.

John Hughes, who wrote and produced, got the biggest paycheque for this film than for any other in his career because he snagged a piece of the merchandising and a staggering 17 000 different items were pumped out for the film’s release. There’s definitely a Hughes flavour to the film, particularly in the second half when the movie starts to feel like a doggie version of Home Alone.

This is perhaps the first of Disney’s live action remakes, and another, a prequel starring Emma Stone as Cruella, will hit theatres this spring.

Journey Back To Christmas

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It’s WW2, and Hanna is “blubbering” on the sidewalk, mourning the loss of her husband overseas. All she ever wanted was to make a happy home for her husband and now that he’s gone, she “has no purpose” even though she’s a nurse who tends to wounded soldiers and orphans and it would seem that that’s usually considered quite a calling. Anyway, one snowy night Hanna (Candace Cameron Bure) gets into a minor car accident and shelters in a shed that…rattles a lot. Gets hit by a storm? Oh, right, a comet. A “Christmas comet.” And she’s knocked unconscious, waking up the next morning…to find herself in the future.

The future (2016) doctors don’t find any evidence of concussion so the future cops consider committing her involuntarily (she knows her name and address, but insists Harry S. Truman is president) but one good-hearted cop, Jake (Oliver Hudson), takes her back to his family farm to recover. They basically adopt her, and more than that, believe her. They start dressing old-timey like her, and adopting the town’s old(e) Christmas traditions. But one man in particular, Mr. Cook (Tom Skerritt) seems to hold the key – to understanding her story, and possibly to returning her to her timeline. Although the town busybody isn’t making it easy. Shes practically trying to raise a mob.

Let’s remember that this is a Hallmark Christmas movie, not a sci-fi film. It’s very light on the science. In fact, it refers to the science as “miracles” which is a convenient way of explaining away the things we don’t understanding without cracking open a book, so kudos to Maria Nation, a writer discovering new heights (lows?) of laziness for humankind.

If your holiday movie watching preferences err on the side of sentimentality, Journey Back To Christmas isn’t a horrible bet. It’s not going to knock anyone’s socks off but I’ve heard from semi-reliable strangers that if you’re prone to romance, you might find this one induces the warm and fuzzies while never raising the heat above an “Oh darn!” (fun fact: although Hallmark movies usually allow for one PG kiss, Bure herself refuses to kiss anyone but her husband, so even though her husband who was supposed to be dead returns to surprise her, the only passion she indulges is to fondly embrace his face).