Category Archives: 2019

After the Wedding

After the Wedding           2 ½ stars

When I was at Sundance last year one of the hottest tickets was for Bart Freundlich’s movie After the Wedding.  I could not score a ticket for it there so finally caught up to now.  The movie is a complex family drama with a plot that is a little too involved to fully explain here.  It is actually a remake of a 2006 movie of the same name from Denmark.  The two main characters are Isabel (Michelle Williams) and Theresa (Julianne Moore). Isabel is a dedicated humanitarian who is part of the staff for a large financially strapped orphanage in India.  Theresa is head of her own media company and is very well off.  The orphanage is contacted by Theresa’s company saying they want to make a substantial contribution to the orphanage, but in order to go through with it, Isabel must travel to New York to meet with Theresa.  The two meet at a very short and terse meeting when Theresa invites Isabel to stay longer and attend the wedding of her daughter, Grace, which she does.  It is at that point, after the wedding that all the drama starts as it is realized that Isabel and Theresa’s husband, Oscar (Billy Crudup) had a previous relationship years earlier and everybody’s world is turned upside down.  The movie is a story of family relationships and people’s choices and their consequences, showing how little control we have over our own lives.  The parts played by the two main characters are done very well by two actresses that I admire a great deal.  I saw the original Danish version back in 2006.  In that movie the two leads were men, so in the remake they were made female characters.  I can remember being more interested in the story with the male characters than I was this time.  It is still a very emotional drama, but I preferred the original version.

The Great Hack

The Great Hack                 4 ½ stars

This week I return once again to the Sundance releases to find a compelling documentary in The Great Hack.  The film goes into the details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2017 and 2018.  It uses the personal stories of two individuals who got caught up in the scandal involving the Trump campaign, Brexit and many elections around the world.  The British company (named by Steve Bannon of Breitbart) teamed up with Facebook and used the personal data of millions of people to find ways of changing their behavior through the spreading of millions of social network postings to swing elections in favor of their clients.  Their most famous client was of course the Trump Campaign in the election of 2016.  One of their tactics was to get individuals to sign up for an app that provided not only their personal information, but that of their Facebook friends as well.  The film introduces us to David Carroll, a professor who sued Cambridge Analytica to recover his personal data in a case that was heard in the British courts.  The ruling forced the company to comply with Carroll’s wishes which they failed to do, making Cambridge Analylica in effect a criminal enterprise.  The other story told is that of Brittany Kaiser, a one-time director who worked for the company for 3 ½ years in a role that made her very familiar with the practice of data harvesting and using it for the benefit of their clients.  Kaiser became a whistleblower who revealed what she knew in testimonies in Britain and the US.  Cambridge Analytica is now defunct, but the film gives us a stark warning that this practice of gathering our personal data and using it to change our behavior is only going to continue.  The Great Hack makes it clear that it may be a long time before we can have a true free and fair election again.

Breakthrough

Breakthrough                    2 ½ stars

Breakthrough is a faith based movie that came out last year that looks a lot like Lifetime movies on TV (or at least how I imagine them). The movie is about a true story of a 14 year old boy who fell through ice on a lake and was under for 15 minutes before being rescued, which makes up about the first half hour of the film. The remainder is concerned with his long recovery and how the boy’s mother stays with him and prays that God will heal him in spite of the enormous obstacle ahead of him. For the most part it was well acted featuring Chrissy Metz of This Is Us as the boy’s mother. Topher Grace is horribly miscast as the pastor of the mother and boy’s church. Grace is fine as a wiseass or a good villain, but is not who you would think of for a sympathetic pastor. Of course the nearly two hour film has an inspiring message of the power of prayer and love, but it could have been done in about thirty minutes less.

Saint Frances

Saint Frances                     4 ½ stars

It appears that Chicago has a new talent in filmmaking in Kelly O’Sullivan, writer and star of Saint Frances. The movie was set to show in Chicago last March but things got put on hold with the pandemic. I finally got the chance to view it and was impressed. O’Sullivan plays Bridget, a 34-year old single woman who has never gotten her life together. At the start she meets and sleeps with Jace, a young 26-year old who is very sharing with his emotions, much more so than Bridget. She then lands a job as a nanny for the six-year old daughter of a lesbian and biracial couple named Maya and Annie. The daughter, Frances is very precocious and opinionated and has a lot to say about Bridget. Bridget, who says she doesn’t even like kids has a lot to learn in this new role as she takes Frances on walks to the park and to her various classes. The young actress playing Frances is a real scene stealer with her often spoken words of wisdom. This is all happening while Maya and Annie are welcoming a new baby boy into their family and Bridget has just had an abortion after getting pregnant from her night with Jace! The writing is brilliant and understated and done with a real sense of pacing making me think that O’Sullivan has the makings of another Greta Gerwig. The film has a message about a person learning to love themselves and has something to say about prejudice toward people that are different without going overboard. I would warn audiences that there is a great deal of talk about certain female bodily functions and the aftereffects of having an abortion that you rarely see in movies today. The squeamish might have a hard time with some scenes.  Saint Frances appears to be O’Sullivan’s first writing effort as well as director Alex Thompson’s first time directing a movie. The movie also features some Chicago landmarks having been filmed in the area. If you are interested in seeing a realistic movie about female friendship I have to recommend Saint Frances.

Pain and Glory

Pain and Glory                   5 stars

Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, Pain and Glory has to be one of his finest. Previously, he has brought us such exceptional works as Julieta, The Skin I Live In, Broken Embraces and Volver and this one is at least as good as these and as full of emotional scenes. The film is about an aging film director who is past his productive prime and lives with a series of ailments that keeps him in pain. The director, Salvador Mallo played by Antonio Banderas is said to be a representation of Almodovar’s life. Mallo created a masterpiece film over thirty years earlier and is asked by a theater if he would appear at a showing of the restored version to give a Q&A. The problem is he would have to do it with the film’s star, Alberto, whom he had a falling out with and hasn’t spoken with since. Alberto had an addiction to heroin which he has not given up and after seeing Alberto, Mallo picks up the bad habit from him as well. Alberto discovers that Mallo has been writing texts about his life with a heartfelt approach and begs him to allow him to produce a performance based on it. Eventually, Mallo agrees to the plan after more arguments and the play becomes a reality. As the film progresses we are shown flashbacks to Mallo’s childhood when his family was poor. His mother played by the amazing Penelope Cruz, (one of Almodovar’s favorites in his films) realizes that young Salvador has a gift and arranges for him to be educated at a Catholic school. This gives him the tools needed for him to later express his creative genius in film. The film gives us noteworthy observations along the way such as how the pain in an artist’s life can lead to some of his most creative works. It’s a film that has some real positive things to say about the power that inspiration can have over times of trouble in a person’s life. This is a film that should be on several lists of the best of 2019.

Deerskin

Deerskin                              4 stars

I heard about Deerskin from a magazine article of some recent good movies that are available online so I picked this one out, a rather dark comedy. To call this movie offbeat and bizarre might be something of an understatement and it probably won’t appeal to a wide audience, but I was very entertained by it. It’s one of those movies that is funny just because it is so absurd, like Damsel which I saw a few weeks ago. It happens in a small French Alpine village where Georges (played by Jean Dujardin of The Artist), a middle aged man arrives. Georges, just divorced, answers an ad for an old deerskin jacket and buys it from an old man. He spends all of his cash for the jacket and receives a video camera as part of the deal. Georges is so impressed by the ‘killer style’ that it gives him he starts to imagine that the jacket is alive and carries on conversations with it. (Does that sound bizarre yet?) Then Georges meets some women in a local bar and makes up a story of how he is a filmmaker and is there for a shoot. (His crew happens to be working in Siberia.) Denise (Adele Haenel of Portrait of a Lady on Fire) falls for this act and agrees to help Georges out including helping him pay for the making of the movie! (Georges’ credit card has been canceled by his ex-wife leaving him with no money.) Thus, the two proceed to put together a movie based on the random scenes that Georges films of various people he runs into on the street. This odd movie succeeds in keeping your attention by making to wonder just where is this all going. I have not even told you the strangest parts of the movie, so you will have to see it to find out. The story and the excellent acting by the two leads make Deerskin something to see for fans of the bizarre. You might even call it murderous madness. This gem is not even 80 minutes long so you can get through it all rather quickly.

Harriet

Harriet                  4 stars

Harriet Tubman, the slave girl turned freedom fighter for many slaves in the pre-Civil War south finally gets the big screen treatment in Harriet. Cynthia Erivo does a superb job of portraying the tiny Harriet with her expressive acting and her big voice. We know Erivo from her role in Bad Times at the El Royale and for winning a Tony for The Color Purple. The movie is something of a romanticized account of her escape from her abusive master, her encounters with the people running the Underground Railroad and her coming a legendary conductor, venturing into the South and leading many black slaves to freedom in the North. The anguish that the slaves went through is told in convincing style, but some of the encounters and dangers of the escape attempts seemed to be a bit overdramatic. Some of the movie serves as a good history lesson such as the treatment of The Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that made it legal to hunt and return escaped slaves in the North and how a plantation owner’s wealth was measured by how many slaves they owned. Some of the violent consequences of the Slave Act are enacted in the film. We also see how some blacks lived in the South as free people, but that required them to carry papers showing their freed status that any white person could require them to show. Notable performances in the movie also include Janelle Monae as Marie Buchanon, a free black woman helping escaped slaves, Leslie Odom, Jr. as Henry Still, one of the leaders of the Underground Railroad and Vondie Curtis-Hall as the reverend who preached obedience to the slaves while also helping to harbor escaped slaves. The movie is two hours long, but seems to move along quickly. I watched the deleted scenes too and was disappointed to see some minor characters removed from the final version. The movie deserves its Oscar nominations for Cynthia Erivo as Best Actress and Best Song performed by Erivo.

The Lion King

The Lion King     2 stars

Disney felt the need to redo the animated beloved movie The Lion King from 1994 only this time with modern CGI effects and a new all star cast. The movie is a technical achievement in visual effects with very realistic looking animals and background terrain, but the feelings of the emotions are missing as none of the facial expressions of the original animated characters can’t be duplicated. I also found it hard to tell some of the characters apart based on their appearance. The familiar story is very much the same as the original so of course there is no new territory covered here. There were good comedic performances by Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner as Pumbaa the warthog and Timon the meercat. The music was impressive with some original songs being sung by an African choir. I am just not convinced that this movie needed to be made even though it had impressive theater ratings.

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil          2 ½ stars

Five years after Sleeping Beauty got the Disney treatment in Maleficent comes the sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. You may recall that in the 2014 movie, Maleficent, the horned winged fairy in the Moors turned out to be a sympathetic character who loved and cared for Aurora, the human princess who had been cursed to eternal sleep. The new movie continues the story a few years later with Aurora (Elle Fanning) still living in the wooded Moors where she regards Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) as her mother. Things are still tense with the humans in the kingdom of Ulstead though where Maleficent is viewed with suspicion by King John and Queen Ingrith (a wonderfully scheming Michelle Pfeiffer). When Prince Phillip, son of the king and queen proposes marriage to Aurora, the upcoming wedding becomes an opportunity for the two kingdoms to unite in an alliance. This leads to a very tense scene that might be called Meet the Parents, Disney style. The tensions boil over and King John ends up with a sleeping curse which Queen Ingrith uses as an excuse to start a war with the fairies. But it turns out that it was the Queen who put the curse on her husband King John which would make her President Trump’s favorite character in the movie. Then Maleficent discovers that there is an entire kingdom of fairies led by Borra (Ed Skrein) that have been hiding out from the humans and are looking for a way to wage war against them. One tragic character is Conall (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a fairy who is opposed to war and is a protector of Maleficent. After this the movie turns into something out of the Marvel movies with a long fight sequence between the humans and fairies with the humans producing a secret weapon to ensure their success. The movie goes back and forth between fight and warlike scenes to cute comical scenes involving cute small creatures of the forest including Thistlewit, Flittle and Knotgrass from the original film. There is also a female henchman, Gerda (Jenn Murray who some might remember as the emotional Lady Lucy Manwaring from Love & Friendship) who is something of a secret assassin of the Queen’s. The special effects are topnotch in true Disney fashion but the story tends to be formulaic and predictable. It’s a good one for true Disney fans to see, but is probably not for everyone.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood      4 ½ stars

What better movie to follow Won’t You Be My Neighbor? than the drama A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood? Tom Hanks takes the role of TV icon Fred Rogers in this dramatization based on the real life friendship between Rogers and a magazine writer played by Matthew Rhys. The writer, Lloyd, is a cynical man who has many personal problems in his life and is suffering from a broken relationship with his father played by Chris Cooper. The magazine, Esquire, is doing an issue on heroes and Mister Rogers is the only one who would agree to an interview with Lloyd. The movie actually focuses more on Lloyd and his anger issues more than it does Rogers, but it makes an effective story. The miniature sets, puppets and fantasy sequences are used to get him to focus on his family and his relationship with his father (who left his family when Lloyd was young). Fans of This is Us will recognize Susan Kelechi Watson who plays Lloyd’s wife. Hanks captures the personality of Fred Rogers well with his personal style of interacting with children and adults. Dealing with Rogers’ direct and personal approach could be very challenging for many adults as well as his teenage sons which is mentioned. He really shows that Mister Rogers was very much the same man as the character he portrayed on TV for over thirty years. The movie takes place in 1998, only two years before the show ended. I find it preferable for a movie to focus on a short period or event in the life of an entertainer or famous personality instead of the traditional life story we see so often. This film delivers the message of dealing with our feelings and life’s challenges that Fred Rogers was all about.