Pretty Woman (1990)

I seem to have been on something of a romantic comedy kick lately, and here is one of the big ones of the genera Pretty Woman. Somehow I had never seen this movie before, though I remember that my parents had a copy of it which was kept in the 'out of generally circulation' VHS drawer, along with The Fisher King and Speed. The movie just works, charismatic leads, charming supporting players, and the story is not in a hurry so there is plenty of time for development. Julia Roberts was only twenty one years old and stunning, and even though she was playing (the worlds cleanest) prostitute and Richard Gere is nearly twice her age and that should be creepy, you still love them together. Such is the magic of Garry Marshall. Deservedly one of the classics. Ralph Bellamy's final screen performance. ****

Dirty Dancing (1987)

Having now seen this I can understand why Dirty Dancing is so popular with its target audience. Set in the Poconos in 1963 this summertime romance is a good girl tames bad boy fantasy, complete with a Patrick Swayze falling unrealistically hard for a Jennifer Grey. But hay that is the intended appeal, though honestly the movie is very well done even while being say a little shy of realistic. Nice supporting part for Jerry Orbach. Strong soundtrack boasts a nice mix of period music and 80's fair including the Oscar winning song (I've Had) The Time of My Life. ***

Isn't it Romantic (2019)

The trailer sold me on this movie in a 'why the heck wasn't this made earlier' kind of way. Rebel Wilson, significantly tamed down from what your used to and in a role that could have been played by any number of people, is Natalie a put upon New York architect who is down on both love and romantic comedies. Injuring her head in a subway mugging Natalie "awakes" to find that her coma dream is a romantic comedy and she must use her knowledge of genera conventions to find love and hopefully wake up for real. This movie strikes a nice balance between mocking and embracing the romantic comedy genera, and the requisite self realization arc isn't too heavy handed. I laughed throughout the picture, which I don't do with most contemporary comedies, and this movie is also much cleaner then most contemporary comedies. Likable fluff that doesn't try too hard, just smart enough, and all in a nice 90 minute running time. ***

Church Ball (2006)

Church Ball was released near the end of the Mormon comedy movie cycle of the George W. Bush years, and it is certainly among the dregs of that era of LDS filmmaking. It just is not funny, it feels very phoned in and pro forma. I recently rewatched Singles Ward, the movie which launched said cycle and that picture still holds up, while Church Ball is just slightly warmed over left overs from the Singles Ward pot luck. About the only thing that really distinguishes it from other Mormon movies of the time is the presence of D level non-Mormon celebrities in the cast, like Gary Coleman and Clint Howard, however they feel wasted here, which can't be a normal experience for them. Really Bad. *

Serenity (2019)

The trailer for Serenity presents itself as a kind of low rent neo-noir, down on his luck fisherman (Matthew McConaughey) increasingly unravels after his ex wife (Anne Hathaway) approaches him for help in killing her abusive current husband (Jason Clarke). That in a sense is what Serenity is about, along with the search for the perfect tuna. However about halfway through this film the audience is presented with a twist, a twist so disjointed, staggering and bizarre that you can hardly believe this movie was ever actually made, especially with stars of this caliber. Said twist elevates Serenity from the unremarkable and forgettable into the top flight of so bad its good movies. I simultaneity cannot possibly recommend Serenity, but I absolutely recommend Serenity. This a 4 star *1/2 movie.

Dragonwyck (1946)

Dragonwyck is a gothic romance from 20th Century Fox about an 18 year old Connecticut farm girl (Gene Tierney) who in 1844 travels to New York's Hudson Valley to stay with distant relatives in their massive estate known as Dragonwyck.  There are definite shades of Hitchcock's Rebecca to the story, and a little known history lesson about New York's Dutch aristocracy. I hadn't seen a lavish old school Hollywood movie like this in a while and I really enjoyed it. Based on a 1944 novel of the same name Dragonwyck feels really condensed,  enough so that I'm kind of curious about the book to see what they left out. A major character just disappears from the second half of the movie without explanation, at least one set up is never paid off, and Vincent Price's late in picture announcement about his drug addiction is so sudden and out of nowhere that I actually laughed out loud. "Your a drug addict? Since when?" But I loved the mode of the piece, it was well mounted and for the most part well acted. In my estimation a minor find. ***1/2

Welcome to Marwen (2018)

In 2015 director Robert Zemeckis made The Walk, a feature film adapted from the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, about French highwire artist Philippe Petit's covertly implemented walking of a high wire between the twin towers of the then new World Trade Center in 1974. The Walk may well have been the veteran directors best movie since Cast Away back in 2000, so one can see the motivations behind adapting the 2010 documentary Marwencol (which I have not seen but hear is really good)  into his new feature Welcome to Marwen. It is seemingly the perfect kind of subject matter for Zemeckis, blending character portrait with special effects vehicle, however the translation process here seems not to have gone as smoothly as his earlier effort.

It is the story of one Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York. Hogancamp had been a talented artist specializing in World War II illustrations, however one night while drunk in a bar he let a group of the wrong people know about his fondness for wearing women's shoes. These men proceeded to beat Mark so severely that he was left comatose, and upon awaking had no memory of his previous life. Unable to draw with any skill anymore but still possessing creative impulses Hogancamp created a fake World War II era Belgian town in his yard, populated it with dolls he had altered, took pictures of them, and became a successful conceptual artist.

Now there are many things about Welcome to Marwen that work, the animated sequences with the dolls which represent people in Mark's life, well that is neat to look at. Steve Carell's performance as Hogancamp, solid and sympathetic. The structure of the movie, and many of the individual scenes work well. Leslie Mann is also quite good in this. The movie aims to be affirming and so many of the  people (principally women) in Mark's life are so very understanding and supportive, and that's great and I applaud that, but their is an elephant in the film that is never directly addressed and which caused the whole enterprise to feel off kilter and slightly irritating to me. Namely that Hogancamp, at least as here portrayed in the movie, is kind of a creep with major boundary issues. He does things in this film that if the film were not about him and from his perspective, well they'd creep you out and you'd want to stay away. Doubtless some of this is a result of the brain injury, but even before that Mark seems to have been something a different duck, and while I don't want to unfairly judge him, and there are many aspects to a person and we should try never to reduce anyone to their oddest quirk or most unappealing personality trait, he's kind of creepy. I just really wish this film would have dealt with that more head on, Mark still could have come off well on the aggregate, but not wanting to address his oddness directly felt odd to me, and precisely what the movie was trying to say, well it's muddled. The tone is sometimes all over the place, and mixture of kid friendly CGI with Mark watching a porno movie, well...

This probably wasn't the best format for his story, I suspect the documentary does a better job of rounding out the person, and even if it doesn't Hogancamp is likely best as an ambiguous character study, not as the protagonist of a self realization fantasy spectacle. The fact that Welcome to Marwen opened to the worst box office number of Zemeckis's career would tend to bear that out. However I have got to applaud the risk taking, an interesting failure. *1/2

The Wages of Fear (1953)

The Wages of Fear is an Italian/French co-production that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The first hour or so of the film follows a group of expatriates of varying backgrounds, poor and stranded in Venezuela, having come for the promise of wealth and now just eking by without enough money to go back to their homelands. Now a little of this seems to go a long way and after about an hour you've had your fill and are wondering what was the point, that become clear in the last 90 or so minutes of the movie. You needed that first part to establish the desperate need of the these people for money, for a chance to escape, and for the languid pace to serve as effective counterpoint to the consistent tension of the rest of film. In short it helps to explain why these people would take on the extremely dangerous job of transporting nitroglycerin across long stretches of rough terrain. The American oil company S.O.C. had a well catch fire some distance from the village in which the beginning of the story is set, and now needs to transport the nitroglycerin from there to here in order to collapse the well and stop the fire, then they can re-dig the well and get back to production. Four desperate men on two trucks are selected to make the drive, and they could all blow up at any moment. A unique thriller with touches of neorealism, it's a really nerve wracking something. ****

Coco (2017)

Despite an inventive visual style and likable enough characters I wasn't a hundred percent into Coco until the twist around 2/3rds through, by the end I was crying. I am a sucker for that family history stuff, and the Mexican cultural elements really refreshingly different for a Pixar film, though Disney has been there before, I loved The Three Caballeros as a kid. So Frida Kahlo is a Disney character now. Loved the rendition of the Remember Me near the end. ***1/2

The Blind Side (2009)

Sandra Bullock won her Oscar for playing Leigh Anne Tuohy, a rich, white, Christian, conservative southerner who is amongst the heroes of this film, and when you type that sentence out, and realize how rare that is in contemporary cinema, you can kind of understand why so much of the Right has a problem with Hollywood. This movie of course is an exception however, it is rare to see such an overtly Christian movie get such a main stream and widely accepted release. The Tuohy family took in a poor black boy named Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron, who is so this character that it is kind of hard to imagine him playing anyone else) and changed his life, gave him a family, made sure he got an education, and helped him discover his natural talent at Football, he has now been in the NFL for roughly a decade. This is a nice, inspiring film, I liked it, it even dealt with the 'white savior complex' ambiguity of the main narrative head on, and that impressed me. The Tuohy family after a little tiny bit of initial reluctance take Michael into their family with lots of love and enthusiasm. My biggest complaint about the film is that Jae Head's S. J. Tuohy is just way too cutesy, and I had a hard time keeping straight what age he was supposed to be. ***1/2

Wonder Boys (2000)

This movie has that Philip Roth, John Updike kind of feel to it. An adulteress professor who is a fading genius, it's set in the north east, has a dry sardonic humor and eccentric characters, is smartly written, and so apparently I need to start reading Michael Chabon. Based on Chabon's second novel, which is about a man trying to write his second novel, Wonder Boys is solid, clever, and well cast. Michael Douglas in the lead, fending off the advances of Katie Holmes while cheating with Francis McDormand who is married to Richard Thomas, while he mentors Toby McGuire, envies Rip Torn's writing prowls, and puts off his publisher Robert Downey Jr. Directed by Curtis Hanson, who apparently was trying to do something really different from L.A. Confidential. Critics liked it, but audiences stayed away both from the initial release in February of 2000 and its rerelease late the same year. This movie has grown something of a cult following however and is among the favorite films of a very movie savvy friend of mine. I didn't quite love it, but I really liked it. ***1/2

Cold Pursuit (2019)

Cold Pursuit is a remake of the 2014 Norwegian vigilante film In Order of Disappearance, in fact they even brought in that films director Han Petter Moland to helm this thing. It is the story of a snowplow driver named Coxman (Liam Neeson, who recently made his life a lot more difficult for himself) whose son is killed by the mob in a case of mistaken identity. Coxman goes on a revenge killing spree against the mob without making himself known, this causes the mob to assume that a rival mob is responsible and starts a gang war. The concept is a pretty clever dark comedy but having already, and rather recently seen the original movie this retread left me cold. I didn't get anything out of this movie that I didn't already have a superior experience of with the original, so it was kind of a dead film going experience for me. The only real change in the story, other then relocating the setting from Norway to Colorado was beefing up a police part (the police are hardly in the original movie) and giving it to Emmy Rossum, who is perfectly adequate in this. If I had not already seen the original movie I image that I would have had a much better time, otherwise this film was just kind of lifeless, I never really felt anything for anybody on screen, even the main bad guy in the original movie was funer to watch. Disappointed. **

Green Book (2018)

Sort of an inverted Driving Ms. Daisy, Green Book is inspired by the true story of white Bronxite Frank Anthony Vallelonga Sr. (Viggo Mortensen) driving black jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) on a concert tour of the segregated south in 1962. The movie hits all the notes one would expect from a movie of this type, personal understanding arrived at through road trip, but is saved from being completely trite by the strength of the lead performances. I wasn't expecting much going in but the movie won me over, it is well enough executed but hardly groundbreaking stuff. The fact that we still kind of need a movie like this, where a white guy learns that racism is bad, well that's kind of sad. ***1/2

Oh yeah, a Green Book was a guide book for African American road trippers, with information on which restaurants, hotels ect would welcome black travelers.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

Peter Jackson's World War I documentary takes period footage, restores it, colorizes it, adds some sound effects and overlapping narration from the oral histories of veterans, and makes that conflict come alive in a way it hasn't before. I saw the movie on a big screen and in 3D and the effect, especially early on, is kind of staggering, it is surreally real and immediate. However sadly after a while you get a bit inured and it loses some of its immediacy. The effort is hampered somewhat by the lack of actual battle footage from the war, camera equipment of a hundred years ago being particularly lugubrious and not suited to capturing trench warfare. Battle aftermath, life in the trenches, basic training, ect that they could capture, and you get a real sense of that. I would say the sequences of trench life were by far the most powerful in the film, trench war for me has always seemed like it would a special kind of hell, and you don't have to see much of this footage to know that you want no where near that kind of combat environment. I am extremely glad this movie exists and would be hard pressed to think of a better way to communicate the war to students. ***

Princess Ka'iulani (2009)

Movie about Princess Victoria Kawēkiu Kaʻiulani Lunalilo Kalaninuiahilapalapa Cleghorn (1875-1899) the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaii at the time that nation was absorbed into the United States. Princess Ka'iulani is a biopic more interested in 'the spirit' of Princess Ka'iulani as a national symbol, then as an exploration of her complex character, or being super faithful to facts. Rated PG it's an odd amalgam of things, coming of age story, fish out of water tale, there is a romance, a Disney-esque character arc of female empowerment, and towards the end hagiography of a national symbol with some standard bio-pic devices. I admire the idea that this film was made, more then I admire what it turned out to be. **1/2

Mormons of the Movies: How Hollywood Sees the Saints - 1992

Ida (2013)

Poland, 1962, Anna (Agata Trzebuckowska) is a young woman of about 17, a novice nun raised in a Catholic orphanage she is sincere in her faith and anxious to become a full fledged Sister. Mere weeks before she is to take her vows Anna learns two things that are to turn her world upside down, 1) she has one living relative, an aunt (Agata Kulesza) who is a committed communist, a former prosecutor and now a judge, and 2) Anna is Jewish. Anna learns that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, and together with her aunt the unlikely pair set out on a journey to learn what really happened to her parents during the German occupation. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature Ida has been described by the film critic David Denby as a "compact masterpiece" the film is only 82 minutes long, filmed in an oddly vivid black and white, it is a beautiful movie, reminiscent of the kinds of films the like's of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer were making around the time this picture is set. Lead actress Agata Trzebuckowska had no experience acting or plans of being an actress when this films casting director saw her reading a book in a café, she has a most soulful face and gives a wonderful, understated performance. Agata Kulesz a veteran Polish actress gives an excellent performance as well as an unhappy woman tortured by what might have been. This is a great piece of work by the Polish/English director Pawel Pawlikowski whose most recent film Cold War is in theaters now and also nominated for a best foreign film Oscar. Ida is pretty amazing, you should see it. ****

Bird Box (2018)

Often described as The Happening meets A Quite Place, you could probably throw in The Mist, Night of the Living Dead and even The Birds in this apocalyptic genera soup. Bird Box is an unexpectedly popular Netflix original movie based on the 2014 novel of the same name by singer/songwriter Josh Malerman. While I can't speak for the source material the movie is mediocre stuff well executed and carried by Sandra Bullock's better then this movie warrants performance. I am a little embarrassed how much I got into this movie, it shouldn't work but did, though I am suspicious that is would hold up on repeat viewing for me. Probably my biggest complaint about the film, after all the logic leaps, clichés, and things that just don't add up, is the way it was cut. Much of the potential suspense of the bulk of the movie is undercut by the "five years later" framing story, if you were to recut the film and then just play it in chronological order I think the movie would be stronger for it. ***

A Star is Born (2018)

A Star is Born is the third remake or threemake of the 1937 William Wellman classic staring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. As the story of A Star is Born is about 'celebrity' and the 'pop culture environment' it is one intellectual property that makes sense to remake every generation or two to reflect changes in those things. Director/star Bradley Cooper is more then capable and has an interesting enough take to offer, Lady Gaga's quite good and the music is really good. The movie contains various little Easter egg references to previous versions, there is I believe a Vanity Fair article you can find online that goes over them in depth. The supporting cast is good, with a nice surprise appearance by Sam Elliott, who is always nice to see, and Gaga and Cooper have a good chemistry going, of course Cooper by himself is one of the most charismatic people alive. The first half of the film is a bit stronger then the second, which gets a little cliché, but then the rise is always more enjoyable then the fall. ***1/2