#nell consumes media fall2019

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had. (Separate film titles will get separate posts.)

Falling Inn Love (2019)

Another Netflix Original, but I made it through this one over three or four nights of viewing. I confess I was drawn to it by the terrible title. How could I not watch?And then it was filmed in New Zealand, so obviously I owed it my time and fealty. 

Films like this seem to succeed or fail on the strength of their leads’ charisma. The love interest (Adam Demos) here had more charisma (*that may just be due to the fact that he tracked as less bland than most love interests in these type of films), although Christina Milian had some of her own—but the times when they had unforced charisma in shared scenes were not as frequent as this film needed to make me give it a recommendation.

I should totally have watched it with @jammeke

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had. (Separate film titles will get separate posts.)

Bells Are Ringing (1960)

Why was this not a musical I knew? That’s a mystery, but thanks, Slingtv, for bringing it to me. 

Judy Holliday (Born Yesterday) and Dean Martin (known for being Dean Martin).The set-up is pretty awesome, to the point that it seems like it could even be remade with just a few tweaks (I’d cast Rachel McAdams, b/c no one falls in love on-screen like Rachel McAdams).

Oop! There she goes!

There are some uncomfortable story beats (it takes a woman’s influence to get Dino to quit drinking and start writing his play, in fact, Holliday steers the lives and fortunes of several men toward their success in this film, and is known as “Mama” in one of her incarnations),

the songs are not particularly enduring (with the exception of “Just in Time”, but you can tell Holliday’s a little bit caged in her performance—something bigger and more fun is lurking just under the surface (I have no idea why it’s never let out), and the costuming is beautiful to see (did women really wear such lovely dresses during average days?). There’s definitely a Doris Day/Rock Hudson feel about things. 

Bonus points because the main character unapologetically carries both a coffee and a cheese Danish in her pocketbook.

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had. (Separate film titles will get separate posts.)

The Chaperone (2019)

This was an enjoyable film. Modest, to be sure, in both its production and its narrative aspirations, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of in 2019. I believe it had a theatrical debut, though that seems too grand for the project. I rented off Amazon.

A teenaged Louise Brooks needs a chaperone in order to travel to NYC to take dance lessons. Elizabeth McGovern puts herself forward.

McGovern is (perhaps predictably by now?) more than up to the task, and I enjoyed her Wichita accent more than I would have expected. The story is hers, after all, she is “The Chaperone” in question. The actress playing Louise does a fine job. Brooks is portrayed as a defanged-for-Masterpiece sexually precocious teen. In the ending acts we learn she is a victim of sexual assault (the film does not state her exact age at the time, other than showing she’s underage—in real life, she was nine when it happened). But the reveal lies undealt with, as well as multiple other plot points that aren’t treated with historical attitudes, but rather with contemporary ones. 

This is not a film that sets out to be anachronistic, and yet. So Downton Abbey! I thought, and then, as the credits rolled, there he was, lurking: Written by Julian Fellows, the king of contemporizing historical morays for a modern audience.

Still and all, there is something that has grown to be important to me about Elizabeth McGovern’s aging (I’m pretty sure without surgery) face. She’s a better actress often times than the material she’s given, and she has a sort of inner dignity that appeals across characterizations. I found myself so happy that she had such a project to work on, a part with a range of emotion and performance that most actresses of any age would covet.

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had. (Separate film titles will get separate posts.)

The Book Thief (2013)

I don’t know how long I’ve owned this, unopened on DVD, but having a low-grade headache last week, I broke it out. It falls into the (I would say, growing) category of WWII/Holocaust films that want to tell a tangential story, rather than a head-on first-person soldier/prisoner/victim story. 

My impressions were generally positive (in that the film accomplishes what it sets out to do), although I will say that recent accusations against Geoffrey Rush (no matter the outcome of his defamation case) tended to disrupt my enjoyment of his character. Emily Watson (who I now find it impossible to recall as that once fresh-faced ingenue, she has settled so well-and performs so reliably—in older female roles)

Here, a reminder for you and for me.

...is great. The lead girl is meant to be something of a Doctor Zhivago (in the sense that the film is through her eyes, save for one or two possibly narratively-flawed exceptions), who experiences the world, but from an acting standpoint might seem impassive, though very likable, and acquits herself well for how I believe she was directed.

The film is narrated/voiced-over in a scattershot way by “Death”, and that would be my biggest itching point. [This is a hold-over from the novel on which it’s based.] The voice-overs disappear for long enough that when they show back up, we’ve forgotten who’s speaking them [and Death is never given corporeal form]. But, worse than that—when your story is narrated by Death, who has taken an interest in you—it means plenty of moments that seem like overburdening a character with more sorrow and loss than they might well bear. Especially a child.

I have not read the novel it’s based on.

*Aside: tangential narratives of WWII/Holocaust have issues out of the gate. They don’t confront or use the world-altering events of the conflict head-on. They don’t always do a good job of letting viewers know what of the world beyond the story is going through (we’re none--or few--of us WWII scholars, after all), and they fail to examine characters as they often deserve (particularly collaborating or outright supporters of Axis powers and ideology). I don’t want to say they outright woobify evil, but they walk a dangerous tightrope with respect to it. [Side-note that evil can be complicated, and it’s nothing but a disservice to simplify it in either direction--to present it with a handwave, or on steroids--as this film does]

Probably, a good film to introduce a child/tween to some of everyday life in Germany in WWII.

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had (films in separate posts)

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

I don’t know what it says about me (or possibly about the film) that I was a good thirty minutes into it before I got the “Cowboys and Indians” reference. For the record, several people I’ve talked to about it think it’s “Cowboys vs. Aliens”.

Here’s the thing. Hollywood just keeps remaking stuff. Casablanca 2020 is probably going to be a thing, you know? So this film, a mash-up between Westerns and H.R. Giger-style aliens deserves some cred if only because it’s not something we’ve seen on film before. *The film is based on a 2006 graphic novel

I was gob-smacked at the list of actors in it as they kept popping up on my screen. Clancy Brown, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Paul Dano, Keith Carradine, Walton Goggins—direction by Jon Favreau. The Very Important to Me Adam Beach, and Sam Rockwell, proving as he so often seems to that no matter how small his part, he can work it like nobody else.

Full disclosure: I often love a Western. Horses and tumbleweed and vaguely gritty cast members—consider me here for it. I immensely enjoy The Quick and the Dead and you should too (just writing that makes me want to watch it again), and I will fight anyone who says that Antoine Fuqua’s 2016 Magnificent Seven wasn’t an eminently watchable popcorn film.

Good times.

Unlike the crew of Firefly’s Serenity, the Cowboys in this film are not from space, and have zero technology or understanding of the alien race that has come to study and exterminate them. This whole turn of events has them (and the nearby Indians) terrified and generally clueless.

All they have is a taciturn, ripped within an inch of his James-Bond’s-life Daniel Craig who’s sporting an alien arm cannon (he’s got amnesia and doesn’t know why). *note: ‘all they have’—c’mon, I have sat through films having far less than this. Craig somehow has enough chemistry with the camera to laser his way into being interesting even when he’s not actually been given anything to do. ‘Slow burn, barely verbal tormented man’ is Craig’s Sistine Chapel.

The film looks great, Ford is grizzled (more on that in a moment), we’ve got a lot going on and a good amount of tension. But though the aliens may be terrifying, they’re not at all nuanced. They never communicate with each other, or with the cowboys. They are literal boogeymen. The only alien the cowboys have access to is Olivia Wilde(!?), portraying what I can only assume was a character titled: Infodump. She’s an alien THESE aliens killed all of her fellow aliens on their planet, and she’s out for revenge and just happened to snag herself a human body to ride around on horseback in. There is a novel’s-worth of things about her unexplored—which gets especially disappointing as the script wants her and Craig to have sexual chemistry off the charts. We know nothing of how she got to Earth, if there’s anything for her to go back for, what revenge means to her culture, whether she is a she or whether gender even exists on her world (somewhat important, one might think, to explore narratively when she’s drawn to hook up with Craig—and he drawn to her). I won’t go on here, than to say for a character meant to power multiple plot points she’s...a face. That’s it--that’s all they’ve given her, a face. (Lucy from Timeless is treated no better, here, in her moments as the prior female in Craig’s life.)

A word about Harrison Ford: I have come to understand that I have to compartmentalize Harrison Ford in my life. As my dissatisfaction with what I know of how he’s treated people in his real life grows [The Princess Diarist, for one], inversely my satisfaction with the roles he’s been choosing to perform later in his life increases.

Ford has little cause in 2019 to care about whether critics and colleagues support the roles he chooses. He’s a beyond successful and wealthy actor, he’s got his Witness Oscar, he will likely become the most enduringly iconic male actor of this era.

And yet, I watch Age of Adaline (interesting premise boringly executed), and he is perfection in every scene he appears in (sadly, not enough). His appearance in that role gave that film any life it had. Like many of these later in life performances, it’s without glamour.

So it is in Cowboys & Aliens, as well. He’s not a nice character [and not like Han Solo who really is a nice character underneath], but he fits into the role, looks perfect in his kit and on his horse, and I was probably never so disappointed as when the script took a turn and decided he and his Indian-hating was to be moderately redeemed by the film’s ending.

Summation: Cowboys & Aliens gets mad props for everything technical. It’s clearly a 100 million-dollar production, and a new-to-screen unique story. But sadly, the script (by 5! writers, including Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof) needed another pass, and the film could have likely been saved in its edit as well.

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had. (Separate film titles will get separate posts.)

Good Sam (2019)

I tried this Netflix Original. For two nights I tried. I love Tiya Sircar as Vicki on The Good Place, but I could not summon up caring about her character here enough to find out where her heart was going to land by the end credits.

I do feel bad about it?

[nettlestonenell]

#nell consumes media fall2019

I’ve been on a bit of a watching jag of late. Here are some thoughts I had. (Separate film titles will get separate posts.)

The Rat Race (1960)

Debbie Reynolds, Tony Curtis. Okay, Amazon—why is this designated a comedy/drama? There is literally not a single comedic beat in this film—no one laughs. Is it because Don Rickles and Norman Fell are in the cast? 

It’s easy to see why Debbie Reynolds was drawn to this project, it’s acting gold—especially for an actress usually cast as sunshine in a bottle. But it’s harder to see why Tony Curtis’ character is meant to fall for her. A bleak story of an embittered taxi dancer and a naive musician trying to make it in NYC who end up sharing an apartment to make ends meet. The melodrama doesn’t hold up as well as it should, partly due to the ‘grit’ [read: sexual peril] the script teases always ending up a pulled punch.