Young VictoriaIn 1836, when Princess Victoria of Kent (Emily Blunt), the heir apparent to the throne of England, first meets Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Rupert Friend), she is in a very delicate situation, both politically and personally.
The Man Who Knew Too MuchNever endanger an American’s children. That is the advice given by a foreign minister to his English lackey when it is already too late for the villains in this remake of a film that Alfred Hitchcock originally directed in England before he crossed the pond. Wishing to enlarge and improve on his earlier film, he teamed up with his signature actor and composer to produce this widescreen thriller in 1956.
MarnieMarnie is undoubtedly Alfred Hitchcock’s most unusual film. There’s no murder, no spies, no sabotage, and practically no suspense. It is a straight up psychological drama. This might have been a great film, with sufficient editing, perhaps with a different leading actress as Marnie and maybe an American actor as Mark, with some of the action sequences done more realistically. As it is, the movie looks like an overblown Hollywood version of what should be a compelling drama.
Midnight CowboyThis classic 1969 John Schlesinger film, adapted by Waldo Salt, from the novel by James Leo Herlihy, won three Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is the only X-Rated film to ever win Best Picture. Starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, in what many consider his signature role, the film is about what happens to our dreams when they are tested against harsh reality.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a DayLondon in 1939 was a hodgepodge of pre-war jitters. Depression era soup kitchens operated down the block from posh nightclubs for the rich and the middle class worked to scratch out a decent living. This is a rip-roaring comedy filled with delightful performances by Frances McDormand and Amy Adams.
Mr. and Mrs. SmithThis 1941 “screwball comedy” was the first of two comedies that Alfred Hitchcock directed during his long and distinguished career, the other being the black comedy, “The Trouble with Harry.” The script, by Academy Award winning screenwriter Norman Krasna, found its way to Carole Lombard, the actress who actually gave the name “screwball” to this kind of comedy, and she backed the project.
Much Ado About NothingIf you buy the cliché that young people who argue and harp at each other are actually flirting, then William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing might have been the first great play to use it. In Joss Whedon’s modern dress adaptation, he has whittled the play to under two hours and presented it in a witty original format.
Mystic RiverMystic River is a hard-hitting blue collar crime movie by the amazing Clint Eastwood. Released in 2003, it tells the story of three boyhood friends forever changed by an incident in 1975. Eastwood makes a point of the fact that things do not add up–it is part of the appeal of the movie. And it is usually a fact of life that most filmmakers do not worry themselves over. For Clint Eastwood, however, the fact that life doesn’t add up is the very point of the movie.
The Savages is a 2007 film featuring two of my favorite actors, Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as sister and brother Wendy and Jon Savage.
The estranged pair, both theater people, have been estranged for some time, both having suffered from parents who were never there for them. Wendy, a playwright, has even written a semi-autobiographical play about their father. She lives in New York working temp jobs and applying for grants and having an affair with a married man who will not commit to her. Jon lives in Buffalo and teaches Brecht at a college.
The two are forced to pull together when their father Lenny (Phillip Bosco), who lives in Sun City, Arizona, develops dementia at about the same time the woman he is living with dies. Over Wendy’s objections, Jon decides to place their father in a nursing home not far from where he lives. However, Wendy is assigned the unsavory task of accompanying the old man on a cross country flight to Buffalo.
Wendy and Jon must deal with their own personal issues, as well the incapacity of a man they once hated.
There’s no doubt that this is a “slice of life” movie and also an “actor’s drama.” Those types of movies do not have to be alienating in any way, especially when you have such incredible talent as Linney and Hoffman in the lead roles. However, I think that even the best slice of life movies must have a hand at the helm that will keep them moving in a direction and I felt that lacking in the script and direction of Tamara Jenkins.
After sleeping on the movie, I did realize that there is somewhat of a character arc for Wendy, but it was so subtle that I didn’t pick it up during the viewing—it only becomes apparent at the end. It is extremely difficult to see any kind of arc for Jon and yet he has changed at the end of movie, too. And I must say that Linney and Hoffman give wonderful performances. The characters are believable, the comedy is very funny, and the drama works extremely well.
I just had the feeling that I was spinning my wheels. The movie didn’t really seem to go anywhere. And yet, it had enough of an effect on me that I thought about it overnight and finally saw what I failed to see during the viewing—an actual character development for Wendy.
For fans of good acting, I highly recommend this movie. For those who cannot take the time to dig the subtlety out of the movie, you might find it tough going.
This 2009 movie saw only limited theatrical release and there’s a reason for that. Although entertaining, writer/director Derreck Borte has created a project that feels incomplete and contrived.
The idea is that some company has ramped up marketing to the level where they hire good-looking people to pose as an extremely wealthy family, they move these people into a big house in an affluent community, then provide then with products that will make their neighbors so envious they will go out and buy their own.
This particular group of cons is led by Kate Jones (not her real name), played with understated elegance by Demi Moore. She’s been working the game for a while, while the failed golf pro/used car salesman posing as her husband, Steve Jones (David Duchovny), is a rookie, still learning the ropes. Their teenage kids, Mick and Jenn (Ben Hollingsworth and Amber Heard) each have their own problems. Mick is gay, but still definitely in the closet, while Jenn is oversexed and prefers older men.
The wife and kids do well at the beginning because they know what they’re doing, while Steve stumbles along trying to figure out. When Kate gives him the tip that he needs to find the right person to endorse the products (she’s gayfriending the local hair stylist), he begins to work on the golf pro at the country club and his numbers begin to skyrocket.
During this time, they are making friends and Steve is trying to pursue a real relationship with Kate, which she is having none of. That’s the set-up and it’s pretty good. There’s a lot of great places you can go from there and I was looking forward to several promising developments.
However, Borte has two serious problems. First of all, for the romance between Steve and Kate to work, there must be chemistry between Duchovny and Moore—it just never develops. Moore comes across as a real cold fish and Duchovny’s ah-shucks demeanor never quite rings true. The second problem is that it doesn’t really develop the comedic possibilities. Instead, it turns stone cold serious when their neighbor commits suicide because he can’t “keep up with the Joneses.”
A better approach would have been to create a situation that forces them into a sink-or-swim mentality, such as the discovery of Jenn’s affair with a neighbor, something that would force them all to work together to convince the neighbors that they were a real family—and then have them develop into a real family in the process. Now that would be a good movie to watch!
The bend into seriousness really causes problems. Matt, for example, has a really interesting girlfriend who doesn’t know he’s gay. There are all kinds of possibilities in that situation, but Borte chooses to have Matt make a pass at her brother. While they are driving at high speed, the girl, following them, gets into an accident and ends up in the hospital. This turn away from comedy is like committing suicide for a writer. It’s giving up because you haven’t figured out the right plot.
Enough said. It’s entertaining. It’s not long, which is a bonus. The best recommendation for seeing this movie is for film students to figure out what when wrong and how to solve it.
This 2002 documentary on the elusive, enigmatic artist Ray Johnson really gives us a lot more than it promises. Almost from the beginning, it is suggests that “no one really knew Ray Johnson” and then, through interviews and close-ups of his art, the film proceeds to give us one insight after another into the man’s genius.
First of all, if you are not familiar with Ray Johnson’s art, this movie will enlighten you very quickly, whether you are looking at one of his happenings, the many postcards he drew and sent to friends and acquaintances or the masterful collages that he frequently changed or cut up for his customers.
A major influence on Andy Warhol, Johnson pretty much ignored every major bid for success and instead chose to always go his own way, creating work that now seems so obviously brilliant that we wonder how he could have avoided success. Everyone in the art world of the 1950’s through the 1990’s knew who he was and what his brilliant contribution to the art world consisted of.
Never married, he seems to have had an amorphous life of relationship, palling around with both men and women, including many artistic luminaries such Christo, Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, Richard Feigen, Morton Janklow, Judith Malina, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist.
For one commission, he decided to drop footlong hotdogs over Long Island. Johnson offered a major collage for $2,000, but a patron countered at $1,000. When they settled on $1,500, Johnson promptly sent the collage with 1 / 4 of it cut off. He did a number of profiles of one person and when they started dickering on the price, Johnson began to make major changes, adding more art, changing some of them to the point that you could no longer recognize the cameo at all. And every time he made a change, he would begin the dickering process all over again, as they became more valuable with each change.
On January 13, 1995, he dove off a bridge into Sag Harbor off Long Island, an apparent suicide. For many weeks beforehand, he had told friends that he was working on his greatest work of art yet. Authorities found his house completely organized with all of his art facing against the wall except for one portrait of himself.
From Wikipedia: “His body washed up on the beach the following day. Many aspects of his death involved the number “13”: the date; his age, 67 (6+7=13); the room number of a motel he’d checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7=13), etc. Some continue to speculate about a ‘last performance’ aspect of Johnson’s drowning.”
Directed by John Walter and with music composed and performed by Max Roach, this is a compelling film, bound to keep anyone interested in the arts completely engaged. The great views of Johnson’s art are worth the price of admission. I highly recommend this movie!
There are just a handful of good boxing movies, but The Fighter must be ranked among them.
This 2010 film written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson is based on the true story of two brothers who each attained some degree of success in the world of boxing. As with most biopics, there is some stretching of the truth in order to make a good movie—and that is just what director David O. Russell gives us.
It’s no accident that the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won two, for Melissa Leo and Christian Bale as Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor.
Dicky Eckland (Christian Bale) had a very promising career as a boxer–in fact, in 1978, he actually went the distance against Sugar Ray Leonard—but addiction to crack brought it to a standstill. Since then, he has been training his younger half-brother, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), who is managed by their mother, Alice Ward (Melissa Leo). But between the mother and brother, Micky always seems to get bad fights. His brother fails to show up to train him and is usually wacked out when he does. HBO has shown up to make a documentary that Dicky claims is about his comeback, but which is actually about the effects of crack on wrecked lives.
Following a terrible loss to a beast of a fighter, Micky begins to question his choices. A promoter from Las Vegas offers Micky a chance to train year round in Vegas and get the fights he deserves, rather than being a “stepping stone” for other fighters. At the same time, Micky meets Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams), a former college athlete who drank her way out and now works as a bartender. The two fall pretty deep in love, but Charlene isn’t putting up with Micky’s situation and they decide to revolt, hire their own trainer, and pull back from his family.
Begging for another chance, Dicky promises them that he will raise the money to support Micky training year round in their hometown of Lowell, MA, so they decide to give him a chance, even though Charlene is highly skeptical. Dicky’s pyramid scheme to raise money fails, so he puts his girlfriend on the street so they can fleece cash out of unsuspecting Johns. When it backfires, Dicky is arrested and sent to prison as Micky begins to climb the ladder to success.
Leaving aside the solid performances by Wahlberg and Adams, this is a truly strong cast from top to bottom. I was knocked-out, surprised by just how truly great an actor Christian Bale is. His performance as Dicky is one of the best I’ve seen in the last twenty years and—even as a supporting actor—he carries the film to levels far beyond what it might have been. Also, one cannot say enough about the amazing Melissa Leo’s, whose performance in Frozen River probably should have won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1978.
Even with enough downers to bring down an elephant, this movie still manages to be a terrific feel-good film. I love movies that show us how we can all be so much more than we are, how we should be awake to change and set goals that move us beyond what we are now—and this movie delivers that in spades. It is a terrific film that I very highly recommend!
Here’s a 2004 film that really went under the radar. It was screened at Sundance and aired on Showtime and Lifetime, but I’d never heard of it. Based on the novel by Laurie Halse Anderson, it tells the story of a high school freshman, Melinda Sordino, who is brutally raped at a party by a senior boy.
Unable to deal with her experience in any way, Melinda doesn’t tell anyone about what happened, but does call 911, which brings the police down on the party. In a state of shock, she walks home alone, then retreats into herself and goes nearly silent to the world. Shunned by her friends, targeted by other students, she finds it nearly impossible to deal with high school. Pushed by her art teacher, she begins to draw and sculp. Continually backing away from others, she finds an abandoned janitor’s closet and makes it her own, filling it with her art and retreating there during pep rallys.
At the time this movie was made, actress Kristen Steward was only 13 years old, but her performance is stunningly beautiful. (Whatever you may think about Stewart because of Twilight, the girl is just an excellent actress, hands down.) She is completely believable as Melinda as the story of the rape is told in flashbacks spaced throughout the film. The excellent supporting cast includes Elizabeth Perkins as her mother, Steve Zahn as her art teacher, Mr. Freeman, and Allison Siko as a girl named Heather who adopts and then abandons Melinda.
The adaptation was written by Annie Young Frisbie and Jessica Sharzer, who also deftly directed the movie inside a 21 day shooting schedule. The film moves quickly and is so absorbing it’s almost impossible not to watch once you get going. At a near perfect 89 minutes in length, the film should be on everyone’s watch list.
Written and directed by Emmy Award winner Janet Grillo, this 2011 low-budget independent film, shot in a mere 14 days is full of emotional punch and great characters brought to life by a bright and talented cast.
The film opens with a close-up of hands winding a circular music box and placing two wooden ladybug figures on top. As the music plays, the two figures move in circles around the top and this works as a perfect metaphor for the relationship that drives this movie. Jeanne (Beth Broderick) is a single mother raising an autistic daughter Mandy (Ashley Rickards) who is 15 years old and having great difficulty coping with her special school. The girl has anxiety attacks in the middle of the night and is prone to violence in her classes. Jeanne is trying to make a living by doing business consulting from her home. Mandy’s father, Peter (J. R. Bourne), tries to take some of the pressure off of Jeanne by taking Mandy for an afternoon, but he is unable to cope with the daughter he so obviously loves.
As these problems develop, Jeanne meets a very nice guy, Tom (Greg Germann), a neighbor who walks his dog in the same park where Jeanne and Mandy walk their dog. He makes an effort to get close to Jeanne, who accuses him of getting close to her from pity. When Jeanne and her partner lose a very important client, the situation with Mandy becomes increasingly difficult and Jeanne must make a difficult decision to either try to continue their life or to enroll Mandy in a residential therapeutic clinic.
Broderick and Rickards both give amazing performances, so real and down-to-earth that they are completely believable in the roles. All of the supporting actors are also terrific. The script is 100% organic and on point throughout the film, developing the themes to a finely honed story. The ending is perfect for both mother and daughter.
I admit that I am an easy target for this kind of script, easily sucked in, and emotionally involved. However, I truly believe that this movie really hits absolutely every note spot-on, so well written, developed, and edited that you cannot fail to be impressed by it on almost any level. There should have been multiple Academy Award nominations and once again the Academy missed the boat.
At a mere 80 minutes, it is perfect in terms of time and development. I highly recommend this movie!
There are a lot of great movies that somehow never make it into the public eye and Frozen River is one of those films. It deserves to be seen–and probably deserved a lot more national attention than what it actually got.
The film is set in the fictional town Massena, New York, the Akwesasne St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, and–believe it or not–the St. Lawrence River that marks the Canadian border. Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is raising two sons, age 5 and 15, with a husband who is addicted to gambling. When the film opens, he has just run off to Atlantic City with their savings, intended as the balloon payment on a new double wide trailer home. The opening shot shows Ray as she sits in her car smoking and crying, the glove box where the money was kept sitting empty. The camera pans up her body to her face, the extreme close-up showing vividly how life has torn this woman apart.
She works in a discount store part time and the family is now in a desperate situation, with practically no money to survive. Dinner consists of popcorn and Tang and the film unrolls with the threat of having their TV repossessed.
When a Mohawk girl, Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) steals the car Ray’s husband had left at the bus station, she chases the girl down. Lila tells her that she knows someone on the rez who will buy the car for $2,000, so they set off across the frozen river to the Canadian side of the Mohawk reservation. But instead of selling the car, they are passed $1200 and asked to pop the trunk. When they do, two illegal aliens jump in.
This new source of income intrigues Ray and she returns to Lila to do another transfer. And so, the two become embroiled in a life of illegal gains that make both of their lives better. And over time, an unlikely friendship develops between them.
Written and directed by Courtney Hunt, this wonderful film stars Melissa Leo a haunting, true-to-life performance that won her multiple awards. Although she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, she did not win. Courtney Hunt was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and also did not win. Throughout the world, the film was nominated for an won a great many awards. Besides great acting and directing, the cinematography in the film is truly outstanding, presenting us with a realistic winter life on the very edge of survival.
At 93 minutes, it is nearly the perfect length. I highly recommend this movie for all to see.
Paul Wake Baker 