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.

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.