Saturday Morning at the Movies

Before getting into my own opinions on a couple of movies, I'd like to provide an excerpt from the recent newsletter from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has become as great a writer and as keen a social observer as he was a basketball player.  He sometimes does his own movie write-ups, and earlier this week, he offered an opinion on something that the professional movie critics do.  

"Over the years, I’ve observed a consistent phenomenon in movie reviews. Reviewers like to champion a young filmmaker launching a film that eventually becomes a franchise. After its success, the critics act like they themselves gave birth to the movie, then breastfed and toilet-trained it. Then, when the franchise grows in success, they treat it like it’s an ungrateful teen who needs to be reminded who’s in charge. That’s when they start to express obvious biases against the movie franchise. When they think the filmmakers have learned their lesson, they will return to praise a later entry into the franchise. Their liking or disliking of the film rarely depends on the quality of the movie, but on the timing of how much the critic wants to remind people of their power. 

"And not just the critics. Social media has encouraged audiences to jump on the bandwagon and trash a movie just because it didn’t live up to the childhood fantasy they’ve been nurturing about the first movie or the original source material. These people think that when they body-slam a movie, it makes them sound knowledgeable and sophisticated. Instead, they just appear petulant and pretentious. 

"I disagree with movie critics that I respect all the time. But I appreciate that they provide criteria for their judgment and give examples as to why something didn’t work. They are thoughtful in their analysis rather than glib, smart rather than smirky."

Kareem was writing about various franchise movies, such as Indiana Jones and the various comic book films, but his comments can be applied to the backlash that we have seen, and upon which I have commented, concerning the third and final season of "Ted Lasso".

Okay.  On to my own attempts to sound "knowledgable and sophisticated" <wink, wink>

No Hard Feelings

As the headline implies, we decided to beat all the weekend crowds at the multi-plex and went to see this gem of a movie at 9:15 in the morning this past Saturday.  The trailers have been all over the place for this one, so you probably know that it is a non-traditional RomCom - it's rated R - that stars Jennifer Lawrence.  This is a different sort of role for Lawrence, and she's great in it.   She plays a bartender/Uber driver living in Long Island whose car has just been repossessed, and she's about to lose her modest family home because she can't pay the property taxes due.  Without a car, she can't take money to pay the taxes, so what's a girl to do?

She happens upon a classified ad placed by a wealthy pair of helicopter parents offering a free car to any young woman who will bring their painfully shy son into adulthood (only in the movies, right?), and that means exactly what you think it means, before he goes off to college at the end of the summer.  As dad Matthew Broderick (yes, Ferris Bueller is now playing Dad roles!) puts it in this great bit of dialog:

Lawrence:  Do you want me to date him, or do you want me to DATE him?

Broderick: Yes we want you to date him.  Date him hard!

The kid is played by Andrew Barth Feldman, who, in  bit of trivia, is the actor who replaced Ben Platt in the title role in "Dear Evan Hanson" on Broadway, and there is a bit of Evan Hanson in this character as well.  Broderick and Laura Benanti are great as the hovering, smothering parents, but the Star with a capital S in this one is Lawrence.  She is pretty, charming, and sexy, as you would expect...

....and she has a terrific comic touch in scenes where she attempts to seduce the clueless kid, where she mingles with some of the kid's contemporaries at a college mixer, and in an almost throwaway scene, where she climbs a set of stairs while wearing roller blades.  

Lucille Ball couldn't have done this any better!

As with most RomComs, you can pretty much see early on where this movie is going to go, but the story is sweet without being sappy, it's funny, and it's filled with great performances, including a terrific one from Jennifer Lawrence.  I keep a list of every movie that I see in the course of the year, and rate them as to my favorite after each time I see one.  "No Hard Feelings" now sits at Number One on my 2023 list.

Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

80 for Brady

It was Saturday night.  The Pirates game ended early, there were no other sporting events  on to watch, network television stinks these days, and it was too early to go to bed, so we said let's watch a movie that doesn't require any thinking.  We happened upon "80 for Brady".  This movie was released earlier this year to coincide with the Super Bowl, and it received zero critical acclaim.  The plot: four older ladies who all love Tom Brady decide to enter a contest to win four tickets to the Super Bowl.  Hijinks and hilarity (?) ensue.

It is a not so bad premise (supposedly based on a true story), but the plot is paper thin and totally ridiculous when you put the slightest thought into it.  What it does have going for it is the chance to see four old pros, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field, and Lily Tomlin, performing and outshining the material that they're given.  The story also revolves around the Super Bowl wherein the Patriots came back for a 3-28 deficit late in the third quarter to win the game, so you can re-live that particular bit of football history.

Oh, and one other funny bit that if you blink you'll miss it.  The contest to win the four Super Bowl tickets?  It was won by four guys who were also named "Tom Brady" and who are part of a "Persons Named Tom Brady" support group whose lives have been ruined because they cannot possibly live up to the expectations of them because they are named "Tom Brady".    That's funny.

One and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.