At The Movies with The Grandstander

Two movies for your viewing pleasure..... 

It Ends With Us

A 2016 best selling novel by Colleen Hoover was big on the book club circuit, and it has now been brought to the screen by producer and star Blake Lively and director Justin Baldoni, who also co-stars in this with Lively.

This is a movie about domestic violence and the cycle of it that seems to repeat itself through generations.  Frankly, I would never have chosen to see this movie on my own, but Linda wanted to see it, and God knows she goes along with a whole lot of stuff that I want to see, so what the hell, off I went to see something that I thought might be just a glorified movie-of-the-week type melodrama.

In fact, It Ends With Us turned out to be pretty good movie about a most disturbing subject.  I knew of Blake Lively, but was not familiar with any of her work.  My favorite movie critic/podcaster Arch Campbell likens her to the type of leading lady that was prominent in the so-called golden age of Hollywood glamour girls like Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, or Myrna Loy, and I won't disagree with him.  She is certainly beautiful, and she was great in the lead in this one.  The male lead with whom she falls in love, marries, and has a child with was played by Baldoni.  He was okay, but that rugged handsomeness that he projected, with the multi-day growth of beard, and tousled hair with the lock that doesn't quite stand straight up and doesn't quite fall on his forehead was just a bit too manufactured for my taste. Then again, maybe I'm just jealous.  Jenny Slate, as Lively's girlfriend and Baldwin's sister, struck a great chord between comic relief and wise counsel to Lively's character.

I ended up liking the movie and I'm glad I went.  Domestic violence is a serious topic that doesn't make for "feel good RomComs", so know what to expect going into this one.  (A group of thirty-something women were seated near us in the theater and when the movie was over, one of them looked at the one of the others and said "Why didn't you tell me what this was going to be about?")

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

The Greatest Night in Pop

Were you around in 1985, and do you remember when the song "We Are The World" was recorded by group over forty pop music stars of the day in an effort to raise funds for famine relief efforts in Africa?  This was inspired by Bob Geldof's Live Aid concerts that were held in London and Philadelphia that same year.  This documentary of how that project came about, and the amazing effort that went into recording the song in one night when all of this incredible talent came together was released on Netflix earlier in the year, and we finally got around to watching it thais past Sunday.

If you don't know the story, the project was conceived by Quincy Jones and Lionel Ritchie.  They had to come up with a song, which Ritchie and co-writer Michael Jackson did, find a studio, and, most importantly, figure out a way to get so many stars together in the same place an the same time, and record the song in one session.   How they managed to do all of that is the story that is told in this terrific documentary.

The recording session was filmed throughout in order that a music video could be released along with the record.  In this film, current interviews are held with Ritchie, Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Cindy Lauper, and Sheila E, artists who performed in the song, as well as many of the recording technicians who were there.  In addition to those artists others who performed included Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, Kenny Rodgers, Al Jarreau, Darryl Hall and John Oates, Kim Carnes, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, and Tina Turner. and I know I'm leaving a whole bunch of them out.  One great line in the film was Paul Simon being quoted as saying "If a bomb goes off in this place tonight, John Denver is back on top again."

It was fun seeing people like Ritchie, Springsteen, Dylan, and Lewis forty years younger than we know them today, and sobering to see how many of those stars are no longer with us.  

"We Are The World" won the Grammy for Jackson and Ritchie for Song of the Year, and it did what it was supposed to do, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for famine relief, and in fact, royalties from the song continue to provide such relief to this very day.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.