At the Cinema - June 2019

Yesterday – 7

Some day there will be a pantheon of lost opportunities, and this movie will have an exhibit all its own.  As a huge Beatles fan, I will admit that month after month of seeing the previews (more on this in a minute) had me pretty excited.  What an interesting premise!  There’s a world-wide blackout, a modest singer named Jack Malick (Hamesh Patel) is hit by a bus, and when he comes to, the Beatles never existed.  But Jack remembers them, and all he has to do is recall the lyrics of all the songs and soon he’ll be a Superstar.  Right?  Well, not so fast.

Never mind all the other cultural changes the Beatles propelled. There is no doubt in my mind that they were the most influential factors of the twentieth century, right up there with cars, wars, and air conditioning, not to mention finally easing me out of my mandatory crew cut.  But, the focus here is wisely on their music.

Unfortunately, the execution is lacking.  There are some good music scenes, but there’s a love story that is rather tepid.  First you must accept the fact that the fluorescent talent Lily James would have an interest in this dull, semi-talented singer, and second you have to accept that he doesn’t seem to notice her, and that’s even more ridiculous.  I'd like to do a complete rewrite.  Having seen her light up the screen in Mama Mia: Here We Go Again, I would love to have seen Lily James as the lead singer here.  OK, she couldn't have sung Nowhere Man, or I Saw Her Standing There, and a few others.  As written here, she is wasted in a thankless role.

The second half of the movie, despite the best efforts of Kate McKinnon as a money-grubber, is one dead scene after another.  I basically wanted to take over directing the movie.

Now I will talk about the trailer.  I have a few pet peeves, most of them traffic related

5)  drivers who don’t know how to accelerate to enter an interstate

4)  drivers who dilly dally in the left lane

3)  truckers who throw their blinker on while you are passing them

2)  drivers who won’t accelerate going up a hill to maintain their speed, but

1)  Trailers that show a preview of something NOT IN THE MOVIE!

The trailer for “Yesterday” features a charming scene of Patel singing “Something” to a co-guest on the James Corden show.   I know this because a) I’ve seen the trailer several times, and b) it’s my wife’s favorite Beatles' Song as evidenced by her swooning when Paul McCartney recently sang it to her.  Yes, he does a George Harrison song in concert, and yes, maybe he should have approved this script. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some charming musical moments.  How could there not be?  But maybe when it comes to the Beatles legacy, it’s just time to Leave it Be.

 

Late Night – 8

Mindy Kaling wrote and stars in this entertaining and amusing look at the late night television talk show world.  She plays Molly Patel, the first female writer on Katherine Newberry’s show.  Newberry is played by Emma Thompson. 

The Larry Sanders Show, which starred Gary Shandling, was the legendary takedown of evening talk shows, but a re-visit is worthwhile in the internet era, and social media plays a large part in the plot.

Newberry is past her prime and the new network President, played by the terrific Amy Ryan, has decided it’s time to move on to a younger comic. Newberry is getting little help from her writers.  She must look to Mindy as Molly to save the day and bring her into this century.

You know where this is going, but the ride is fun.  The fact that my two favorite talk show hosts Bill Maher and Seth Myers have cameos won some points with me.  What is a little surprising is that the usually wonderful Emma Thompson is rather bland in her role, but maybe that’s the point. 

I’ve always liked the late night talk shows.  I find you sometimes have to wade through a lot to get to a little.  What I’ve never been able to figure out is why American television ends up with so many British hosts like Katherine Newberry.  James Corden, Piers Morgan, Craig Ferguson to name a few.  Just an interesting phenomenon.

Anyway, who’d of thought that Mindy Kaling could carry a movie.  Looking forward to her next project.

 

Rather than scanning the satellite this month, as I am in mid-binge on so many shows, I thought it would be fun to answer the CNN twitter question, and perhaps get your input.

They asked, "If you could only watch 5 movies for the rest of your life, what would they be?"

With honorable mention to The Sound of Music, A Few Good Men, Tombstone, and LA Confidential, I would go with:

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Annie Hall

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 

Chinatown

Gone Baby Gone

What are your 5?

At the Cinema - August 2018

Mama Mia – Here We Go Again – 8

While the audiences wait for the 4^th iteration of “A Star is Born” they can look no further than this frenetic wafer of a film to see it actually happen.  Lily James sets the screen on fire as the young Donna of Donna and the Dynamos, played by Meryl Streep in the first Mama Mia, and briefly in this movie.  You see, the Meryl version of Donna has died of either movie disease or contract negotiations, leaving Pierce Brosnan alone to paint well and sing poorly on their Greek island.  Her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is still singing and has taken over the restoration of her mother’s hotel project.  Early on, a storm comes and goes as the movie does the time warp shuffle between past and present.

Apparently, the budget was modified to bring on Cher as Meryl’s mother (I know) to sing a couple of songs.  To put it kindly, she looks like someone slapped white paint on Mt Rushmore.  But she can still sing, and it’s very helpful that the former boyfriend she runs into is named, wait for it, .. Fernando.

Once you throw all this in the pot, you have a fairly entertaining movie, a tad better than the first one, mostly due to the casting of the young Donna and the Dynamos, led by Lily James, who would be perfect in the fifth Star is Born.  The 40 year old pop of Abba is reprised, including some lesser known songs and if you liked the first Mia, you’ll like this one too.

 

RBG – 9

As it turns out, there is a lot to learn about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  She was a prominent lawyer in the Women’s Liberation Movement, winning 5 of 6 cases she argued before the Supreme Court.  Prior to that she was a pioneering female student at Harvard Law School.  After that she was a Judge renown for her thoughtful opinions. In this wonderful documentary, friends, family, and foes speak glowingly about her persistence, her intellect, and her work ethic.  Her friendship with her polar opposite, the late Anthony Scalia, is examined and it seems they met their intellectual matches with each other.  Finally, it chronicles her tacking to the left as the court continues to move to the right.  This movie will be shown on CNN soon, and it’s another one of many great documentaries in 2018  

Scanning the Satellite:

The Sinner: Season 1 – 10

In keeping with the Binge economy – “I’ll give you 8-10 terrific episodes” – the USA network gets into the Fargo – True Detective act with this terrific series.  The first season, available on Netflix, stars Jessica Biel as a woman who goes berserk on a beach one day, and stabs a man who is being to cozy with his girlfriend.  The story is so far-fetched that it is riveting.  Biel and costar Bill Pullam (as a troubled detective) have never been better.  Got a weekend?  Take the plunge.

Sharp Objects – 1
HBO’s highly acclaimed summer series stars Amy Adams, and the accolades end there for me.  While Amy is terrific, the series is a muddled mess of misdirection.  It’s a sure sign that your murder mystery is a calamity when after 8 episodes you don’t reveal the killer until half way through the closing credits (hope half the audience hadn’t tuned out by then) and it’s so obscured that you better have a recorder so you can slow it down and look at it frame by frame.  More ridiculous than you can imagine, even with the high brow praise.  Got a weekend?  Go to the beach.

Succession – 3

HBO’s other summer entry was one that I gave up on after about 4 episodes.  It has not one interesting or sympathetic character.  Hard to watch when you have no one to root for in a family of megalomaniacs.