Movie Review - "Ammonite"

"Ammonite" is a British movie written and directed by Francis Lee.  It made the the Film Festival circuits in late 2019, and was to be released in early 2020, but got lost in the COVID Pandemic shuffle.  It was finally released theatrically in the United States in November of 2020, but if it played anywhere in the Pittsburgh area, I missed it.  It is now available for rental on Prime, and that is where I watched it today.   To be perfectly honest, in and of itself, this is not a movie that I would be inclined to see, but I wanted to see it because of its two leading actresses, Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.    I have said it before, if they filmed Saoirse Ronan reading the phone book, I would no doubt pay to see it.  Kate Winslet was an added bonus.

The story takes place in an English Channel seacoast town in the 1840's.  Winslet plays Mary Anning, a paleontologist whose discoveries were, and probably still are, on display in the British Museum.  Her discoveries were important and widely acclaimed, but due to the societal mores of Victorian England, she herself was not.  She spends her days combing the  rocky Channel beaches looking for fossils and gathering shells for she and her aging and ailing mother to sell to tourists in their small shop.  It is a lonely, forlorn, and mostly a silent existence.  See what I meant by this not being one that I would normally be inclined to see.

Into her life comes another paleontologist  Roderick Murchison and his wife Charlotte, played by Ronan.  Roderick seeks to learn from Mary before he departs on an expedition of is own, and Charlotte is there, suffering from "melancholia" according to Roddy, and needs the sea air to soothe her and help her recover.  He convinces Mary to allow Charlotte to stay with her while he's gone to assist in her recovery.  Mary has no desire to do so, but Murchison will pay, and she and her Mum could use the money.

Much like Mary, Charlotte too suffers from the repressions towards women in the era.  Mary begrudgingly takes care of her and takes her along on her beach hunts, and soon the two of them find something in each other that is missing in each of their lives

The relationship soon takes on physical aspect and Mary and Charlotte engage in a sexual affair.  The lovemaking scenes between them are quite powerful and erotic.  I wouldn't call them pornographic, but at the same time, I have to say that they might not be to everyone's taste.  You've been warned.

I mentioned that the reason I wanted to see this film was to see Winslet and Ronan together on screen and they did not disappoint.  As always, Saoirse Ronan was terrific, but this movie really belongs to Kate Winslet.  There are long stretches of this movie where the dialog is limited and is often drowned out by background noise (use the subtitles when you stream this one), so the actors need to rely on facial expressions and physical reactions, and, boy, do they pull it off.  Pay attention to Winslet's face in one scene as she sits in a gathering in an upper class parlor when a musical recital is being given.  And watch both of them as Charlotte boards a carriage to leave the little beach town and return to her husband in London.  Both are real WOW moments.

Like I said, this movie normally be my cup of tea and would probably only get Two Grandstander Stars, but the presence of Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan earns this one Three Stars.

By the way, Mary Anning is a real historical figure.  Charlotte Murchison is not.   There is no historical evidence that Mary was gay, nor is there any such evidence that she was not.

"Mare of Easttown" Concludes (Post Contains No Spoilers)

Over the last several years, and this has certainly been exacerbated in the last year due to the pandemic, television has changed, as has the entire delivery system of how we receive our video entertainment.  Video Streaming services are now what one needs to fully enjoy all of the content that is being delivered to the public.  So much so that it is almost impossible to see everything that is available to us.  My friend Dan characterizes this era as the new Golden Age of Television, and who can argue?  Shows like The Crown, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jack Ryan, Perry Mason, The Undoing....all terrific series that we have enjoyed, and all available only through various video streaming services.  At this point, there is not a single series on regular network television that we are regularly watching.

All this is a prelude to a write-up on what may well be the best of such series that we have watched so far, "Mare of Easttown."

In this gritty seven part series, Kate Winslet player Mare Sheehan, a divorced police detective in the small eastern Pennsylvania town of Easttown.  An Academy Award winner, and the beautiful Rose from 1997's "Titanic", Winslet is anything but glamorous in this one.  The outfits she wears always appear thrown together, her hair is always a mess, and she also appears to be a bit overweight (she has to be hip-padded under those jeans and sweatpants), she lives with her widowed mother (wonderfully played by Jean Smart), her high school senior daughter, and a four year old grandson, the son of Mare's deceased son.  Her ex-husband lives in a house directly behind hers, and he is about to remarry.  In short, Mare's personal life is pretty much a mess.

In the first episode, we learn that twenty-five years before, Mare made a winning shot in a state championship basketball game, an event that may have been the only good thing that ever happened in Easttown.  We also learn that (a) Mare's social circle, such as it is, consists of her high school basketball teammates (no one leaves Easttown, apparently), (b) the town is still roiled up over the disappearance of a teenaged girl a year before - what have Mare and the cops been doing about that? - and, oh yeah, (c) another teenaged girl, Erin McMenamin, has been murdered, her body showing up in a creek in a park, dead from a bullet wound to her head.

It is the unraveling of the mystery of the death of Erin that throws the town into a complete turmoil.  Who did it and why?  There is no shortage of suspects, and everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, in Easttown seems to have secrets to hide, and everyone seems to be connected to each other in some way.  As one critic I read put it, the murder of Erin is a thread that, once pulled upon, causes the entire fabric of the town to unravel (great metaphor, right?).

There are wonderful aspects to this series.  There is the performance of Kate Winslet.  She will undoubtedly be Emmy nominated for this one.  There are the local details that the production gets just right.  People wear Eagles, Flyers, and Phillies gear, they shop at Wawa, eat cheesesteak hoagies, drink Rolling Rocks and Yuenglings, and best of all, they have that Philly, or Delaware County (DelCo) accent, down perfectly.  (Go to YouTube and check out the fabulous send-up that the Saturday Night Live people did a few weeks back.) 

Like most people in the Philly area, the Sheehans 

apparently spend summers at the Jersey Shore 

Best of all, though, is the writing.  Each week delivered a twist and a cliffhanger ending that made you completely PO'd that you had to wait a week to see how THAT was going to play out.  Interestingly, HBO chose to release this one episode at a time over seven weeks, so you were unable to binge it all at once, which only heightened the anticipation to see the next episode.  Even in the final episode, just when you thought....oops, forget it; I promised no spoilers.  If you haven't watched, you can start now and will be able to see all seven episodes one right after another. And if you don't have HBO MAX, sign up for one month, watch this series, and then cancel after a month.  It is one way that you can game the Video Streaming System and keep you costs down.

Both Marilyn and I are now just really bummed out that this show is over.  I don't believe that there is any talk of bringing it back for a second season.  Probably best to just leave it on the high note of television entertainment that it was.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Oh, I mentioned that Mare's mother, Helen, was played by Jean Smart.

Winslet and Smart

Daughter and Mom

Smart was fabulous in the part, and her role here drew us to another  HBO series in which she is currently starring called "Hacks."  She plays an older Las Vegas diva comedienne, whose star is waning and her agent teams her up with a young female comedy writer to help her out with her act, help which she doesn't feel she needs.  Six of the ten episodes have already aired, two new episodes drop every Thursday, and it, too, is a terrific show.   I'll be writing about that one at some point in the future as well.

Two Movies and a Book About Movies

First the book....

Thanks to my movie maven pal Barb Vancheri for recommending and then lending me the book you see to your left. It was published in 2005, but it is not all that dated, and it tells, as its ponderous subtitle indicates, about high times and dirty dealings backstage at the Academy Awards (whew!).

I enjoyed this book a lot because you do get a lot of inside scoop about the people that you see when you go to the movies and watch the Academy Awards show.

One name mentioned throughout the book was that of Harvey Weinstein.  The first significant mention of Weinstein in the book refers to him thusly: "The (Weinstein) brothers, particularly the corpulent, flamboyant Harvey, were known for abusing staffers, bullying filmmakers, throwing tantrums, driving hard bargains, and a host of other sins both common and uncommon in the movie business...."  Other mentions of Harvey throughout the book are usually made with reference to his bullying tactics and borderline shady business dealings in the industry that we generically define as "Hollywood".  Not mentioned in the book were the now very well known sexual proclivities of Weinstein, which have been reported to run the gamut of sexual harassment to full on sexual assault.  I am guessing that Weinstein's sexual appetites were well known at the time this book was written, but for some reason were not mentioned in the book.

Anyway, as I said, lots of fun inside stuff in here.  A few takeaways of mine:

• The egos of the "talent" in the movie business are beyond belief.  How the production people, who probably have some large egos themselves, deal with it is beyond me.
• The Academy Awards show is just that - a show, more specifically, a TV show.  The money that ABC pays for the rights to televise that show finances much of what the Academy does.
• In the eleven Academy Awards shows covered in this book, five different producers ran the show, each vowing to bring a "different" look to the show, to make it snappier, more relevant, and, above all, shorter.  In the end, all the shows ended up looking pretty much the same.  In the fourteen years that have happened since this book was published, the show still looks pretty much the same.
• In the end, what makes the show memorable are the moments that can't be planned or scripted: Jack Palance doing one armed push ups, Michael Moore making an overtly political speech and getting booed off the stage, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry winning Oscars the same night, or, more recently, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway being given the wrong envelope and announcing the wrong Best Picture winner.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

Now, the movies....

Woody Allen's 2017 release, "Wonder Wheel", was generally panned by critics.  If it even opened in Pittsburgh at all, it was here and gone in about five minutes, so we finally caught up with it via streaming (I feel so hip when I say that!) last Saturday.

As Allen movies go, it was not that great, but it had some things going for it, mainly Kate Winslet and some photography and lighting that was just gorgeous.  Working against it was Jim Belushi as one of the male leads.  Justin Timberlake and Juno Temple as secondary leads were okay. It was no comedy, and was a bit dark in tone.  Like I say, I don't think it was as bad as some critics said, but you do expect more from Woody Allen.

Kate Winslet

Oh, and for fans of "The Sopranos" also appearing in the cast were Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) and Steven Schirripa (Bobby Bacala).  They played, not surprisingly, a couple of Mafia hoods.

Two and one-half stars.

The second movie is the current "Red Sparrow".

This is a rather convoluted set-in-the-present spy thriller.  It has some rather gruesome scenes involving Russian interrogation techniques that are hard to watch, and at 139 minutes, it is about thirty minutes too long, and I am still not sure which side Jennifer Lawrence ends up being on, so this was no great shakes.  

However, it does star the aforementioned Jennifer Lawrence,

as Dominika, the Russian prima ballerina turned spy, who is trained to use her beauty and powers of seduction to become a "sparrow", a spy who will get all sorts of secrets from those bastard Americans.  All so her mother can continue to receive proper health care from the Russian government (told you it was convoluted).  Anyway, Lawrence is terrific given the part she had to play in this potboiler.  She's a wonderful actress, and she does kinda sorta make it worth seeing the movie.  But that's about it.

And be prepared to turn your head away from the screen during the interrogation scenes (there are at least three of them in the movie).  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Two stars.