City of Angles (1998)

Brad Silberling helms this American adaptation of Wim Wenders 1987 German film Wings of Desire, which is about an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman and choses to become human to be with her. The two halves of this couple work good separately, Meg Ryan is charming as always as an L.A. doctor and Nicholas Cage as the angel does a good job of playing someone who isn't human, however together they have no chemistry, I just did not get the attraction between them. I thought the story was corny and slow, it had a few interesting ideas concerning angels but not enough, or at least not explored sufficiently to be enough. I really liked Dennis Franz as the previously "fallen angel" who tries to help Cage make his decision and then learn about being human, he was the best part of the movie but still not enough. Andre Braugher is more or less wasted here. It probably hurt some that I basically knew the whole story before going into the movie, though this is the kind of movie where story is always going to be secondary, it's supposed to be about the romance, and because there is no chemistry the romance doesn't work. This movie was really broke in the casting phase and its fun to try to think who else they could have put in this back in the late 90's, it could have been better (John Travolta) or it could have been worse (Mel Gibson). Well thought of by a certain generation of particularly women movie goers, but I do not think it stands the test. Kind of a bore. *1/2

Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

There is a scene in the John Updike novel Toward the End of Time where the main character is babysitting his grandchildren for a night, they watch some kind of Japanese cartoon and he later comments that while he couldn't make heads or tales of it the kids sure seemed to enjoy it. I felt something of this hesitation going into Pokémon Detective Pikachu as Pokémon arrived after the time when I would have been its target audience. While there is certainly some 'inside baseball' elements to the film which I'm sure would make much more sense given a better familiarity with the material, things are 'dumbed down' and explained enough that the film is comprehensible to the Pokémon lay person. I suspect this is mostly because the film seems principally meant as a vehicle for Ryan Reynolds to do a PG version of his Deadpool shtick as a Pikachu who miraculously can be understood by the son of his former trainer (Justin Smith). Pikachu and Smith teem with Kathryn Newton to investigate the disappearance of Smith's father and a mysterious gas that can turn domesticated Pokémon violent. A little smarter then you might expect, the cast which also includes Ken Watanabe and Bill Nighy is uniformly good, as is the sense of world building, which makes the film work rather better then I had expected. A pleasant enough offering though hard to fit into any neat genera category. **1/2

Midsommer (2019)

Midsommer is basically a longer, slower, stranger, more graphic, Scandinavian version of The Wicker Man. Only instead of Sgt. Howie looking for a lost girl on an isolated Scottish island, its a bunch of grad students, and one of their girlfriends, journeying to a religious commune in the north of Sweden to study the rituals of their summer festival. Folk horror is a fascinating genera with a pretty slim cannon so I'm always curious to see more however I almost walked out of this movie. There is a sequence very early in the film that is downright offensive. If the creators wanted to establish that this event took place I think they could have done so in a couple of lines of dialogue, I did not think it was necessary to show, and to top that off its only tangentially related to what comes later.

After the initial shocking event the film is a slow burn, which I'm fine with but I think this movie took way much more time then it needed to. The story is well enough structured, the piece has a nice since of foreboding and unease throughout, but the original 1973 Wicker Man film accomplished the heart of what this film does more interestingly, less oppressively, and about an hour quicker. Midsommer is 2 1/2 hours long and its not a pleasant sit. Had I not seen anything of this films type before I'm sure this would have been a very different experience but I've seen better. This movie isn't particularly scary, but it is full of horror, you see a lot of horrible things and I did not get the sense that the film maker really had much interesting to say about them, and if your just going to be SAW with intellectual pretensions I don't see the point. For some far superior cerebral horror of the last few years I would recommend The Witch and Get Out. Midsommer is quite competently made and it has the look right, but I found its substance rather wanting. *1/2

You've Got Mail (1998)

Seeing this movie for the first time, 21 years after its initial release, I find that You've Got Mail is so intensely 1990's that it plays less as a typical movie of its time and more as if it had been written as a Clinton era period piece. This is particularly interesting given the linage of the story, You've Got Mail is a broad strokes remake of the 1940 romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner, which stared Margret Sullivan and Jimmy Stewart, which in turn had been based on the 1937 play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklós Laszlo. It is the story of a romance begun by letter, in this case email, between two anonymous pen pals who have no idea who each other are in real life, and ironically in "real life" they hate each other. Meg Ryan (at the top of her career receiving $15 million dollars to play this part) is Kathleen Kelly, a small business woman who is fighting hard to keep the children's book store (The Shop Around the Corner) that her late mother started afloat against increased competition for a new nearby Barnes & Nobel type chain store (Fox Books) that is the family business of online flame Joe Fox (Tom Hanks).

It's the predictable comedy of misunderstanding, pulled off by able direction, a very efficient screenplay, and the performances particularly of the leads (at the time America's cinematic sweethearts) but also buttressed by a surprisingly good supporting cast including Dabney Coleman, Greg Kinnear, Parky Posey, Steve Zahn, Jean Stapleton, a pre famous Dave Chappelle, and a personal favorite Heather Burns. Though the plot has to do with the then current issue of 'big box chains' endangering the mom & pop shops (ironic now that many of the big box retailers are threatened by online competition) you will be disappointed if you expect this movie to have much substantive to say on the topic. No the business angle is merely a McGuffin to complicate Hanks & Ryan's courtship. For a film that is really paint by numbers it works surprisingly well, and has more ambiguity and paths not taken then I had expected. More or less perfectly what it set out to be You've Got Mail is a crowd pleasing romantic comedy that did crazy good business at the time of its release, more then a quarter of billion dollars world wide in 1990's money, and today is regarded as something of a classic. An old style romance in dial-up dressing. ***

Buddy Buddy (1981)

The viewing of Buddy Buddy caps off a personal bucket list item, it was the last of Billy Wilder's feature directorial efforts I had yet see, and ironically the only one of his films to have had its first release during my life time. Buddy Buddy doesn't have a great reputation critically, or at least didn't on its first release, and even the director and his stars didn't think much of it. Based on the French black comedy L'emmerdeur, Buddy Buddy see's the action relocated to and filmed on location in Riverside, California, which in the early 80's appeared to be semi rural (pretty confident its not now).

Appropriately this a buddy comedy staring Wilder stalwarts. with Walter Matthau playing an expert assassin hired by the mob to kill a grand jury witness (the plan is to kill him sniper style from the hotel across the street when he is being escorted into the courthouse), who keeps being interrupted by the suicidal television censor staying in the next room, played of course by Jack Lemmon. Lemmon is in town to try to reconcile with his wife (Paula Prentiss) who has left him for a sex therapist played by Klaus Kinski ( potentially making this film pretty valuable in an international game of 'the six degrees of Kevin Beacon').

To prevent Lemmon's suicide attempts from drawing unwanted police scrutiny of his crows nest, Matthau reluctantly finds himself enlisted in the cause of saving Lemmon's marriage. It's not a great film but I rather enjoyed it, I thought it was funny and really liked seeing Matthau and Lemmon together again in what is all but a lost film. Like some of Wilder's later work this old 'studio system' director seem to really enjoy the freedom to show nudity and use bad language, he doesn't do this a lot but its enough that I find it slightly jarring, Wilder was a master of subtlety and I think his work suffers a little bit for not being constrained and having to play around those constraints. Better then I had anticipated it being, the Wilder map-cap formula most associated with his 1960's work is on full display and I had a good time watching this. This movie should be better remembered. ***

Yesterday (2019)

After a freak, unexplained, world wide 12 second "black out", aspiring but perennially unsuccessful musician Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) discovers he may be the only person on the face of the Earth who remembers The Beatles. With the iconic group mysteriously erased from history Jack now has a back catalogue of great songs no one has ever heard before and a seeming ticket to world wide stardom and happiness. However as Jack's career starts to take off he realizes that this may cost him his chance at romance with longtime friend Ellie Appleton (Lily James), who had previously been the only person to really believe in his talent.

This good natured fantasy/romantic comedy is a pleasant watch, which has some clever bits, a likable cast, and of course a great soundtrack. It's really a creative way to "reintroduce" The Beatles, and makes me wonder how aware the 30 and under crowd even are about the group these days. If my 10 year old nephew were to watch this film it would make very little sense to him, but I would have gotten it had it come out when I was 10.

It's nice to see this fantasy concept brought to film form, I know that I'm not the only person who had the youthful fantasy that if only "X" didn't exist I could invent "X" and be rich and famous. Some of my favorite moments in this film would constitute spoilers so I'll just say that I saw something in this movie I never expected to see, and the ending went in a direction I hoped it would, but didn't' really expect it to. *** 

Proof of Life (2000)

In Proof of Life Russell Crowe plays an expert kidnapping and ransom negotiator who is brought in to help Meg Ryan win the release of her husband David Morse after he is abducted by guerillas while working on a dam in a fictional South American country. This film stays consistently just above that line where it would otherwise lose my attention, its just interesting enough and I kind of marveled at that, being just barley not boring is a real accomplishment. A vary talky film interspersed with scenes of Morse's captivity, it tops off with a well done and reasonably tense hostage rescue sequence. Perfect supporting part for David Caruso. **1/2

Ophelia (2018)

Shakespeare's Hamlet sure inspires a lot of sequels and riffs, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet 2. Now comes Ophelia, based on the novel of the same name by Lisa Klein the film is a revisionist take on Hamlet's love interest that recasts its lead as a feminist hero, not something I recall Ophelia being in the play. The story here takes its liberates with the source material and recasts it in an opening narration of Ophelia stating that yes you've heard a story "about" her, but now it's time to tell her "real" story. I don't mind the loosening of the story, a classic work is one that cries out to be reimagined to suite changing times, and the 14th century Denmark presented here is certainly a racially integrated one. Daisy Ridley anchors the piece as Ophelia, assisted dramatically by Naomi Watts, and to a lesser extent Clive Owen. This movie took around 40 minutes to get going and I was a little bored, but after the King is murdered it becomes more interesting and held my attention, Hamlet already has a crazy ending as it is, but Ophelia pushes that up a notch to where it teeters on parody. This movie grew on me and really brought home just how much Daisy Ridley want's to broaden her career. ***

Dumbo (2019)

I went in expecting not to like Tim Burton's Dumbo, the feedback I'd gotten from people who had seen it as well as the critical consensus was negative to middling, however I rather liked the movie. If Disney is going to do live action/CGI remakes of its classic animated canon, I don't see a point if all your doing is a clone because we already have the superior version of any such clone, do something a little different, mix it up or approach it from a new perspective, Tim Burton's Dumbo does this. It's a different Dumbo story, but it touches the main points of the original, and I liked the little homages, referencing things, giving them the little nod, like the mouse or the pink elephants, but not building everything around them. I loved Dumbo's design, adorable.

I gather a lot of people didn't care for the new human characters, they weren't deep but I liked them, they were a good fit for the movie. Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito together again under Burton's direction nearly 30 years after Batman Returns. Keaton's character is like an evil version of Walt Disney, but he personifies many of the criticisms that Disney held about earlier amusement parks. I liked the whole post World War I setting of the film, and of course the visuals are great, and not too Tim Burtonie. Their are few more seemingly perfect parings of director and muse then Mr. Burton and Eva Green, if she didn't exist Burton would just have to make her up, like he attempted to do with Lisa Marie. An enjoyable film, which I though benefited from being undemanding. Yes their is a definite "woke element" to the film but I didn't think it was overwhelming or off putting, Tim Burton seems good at keeping his films politically mellow. So again I liked it, a little surprised more people didn't.***

Toy Story 4 (2019)

Toy Story 3 ended things so beautifully that their didn't seem to be any point in making another, it would likely be superfluous or even blasphemous to do so. Fortunately Toy Story 4 keeps the quality up, its smart and funny, it has something new to say, and some enjoyable new characters, particularly Kay and Peele as stuffed toys from a carnival game, and Keanu Reeves as a vintage 70's stunt man toy named Duke Caboom. The movie is consistently entertaining, my only criticism might be that some of the more established characters have very little to do, Buzz Lightyear's arc is more or less a make work assignment, a "we've got to give him something to do in this" storyline. This is really Woody's movie. The previews by the way give very little of the plot away after the first 40 minutes, Forky will grow on you. I laughed out loud quite a few times, and while not as moving as the previous movie Toy Story 4 does provide a nice little epilogue to the franchise, and without trying too hard is still likely the best "kids movie" so far this year,  ****