Prime

My Partner With the TRUE love of his life

Grade: D-

Oy vey iz mir.

Let’s cut to the chase – Meryl Streep is the finest actor of her generation (please note: my partner is already furious with me for using the qualifier “of her generation.” “Who’s better outside her generation?” he hollers at me. This gives one a sense of how many nights I may end up sleeping on the sofa for maintaining my honesty and integrity with this review). Considering her many contributions to the arts, she is most certainly allowed a rotten egg every once in a while.

But I shouldn’t have to pay to smell it.

In what is essentially a supporting role, Streep plays an upper-west side Jewish therapist who quickly discovers one of her patients is having a passionate romance with her much younger son. Her voice is nasal and whiny, her glasses geeky chic, and she has numerous oversized beaded objects hanging around her neck. Her performance is distracting at best, more often downright annoying in its broad “oh my gawd” shtickiness. But the more important question is how Streep could have read this genuinely schlocky screenplay and considered signing on to the project in the first place.

The woman in love is a successful, smart, beautiful thirtysomething. The man is an unemployed, immature artist in his twenties who still lives with his grandparents. Good sex may be a great reason for a fun weekend, but there is nothing to suggest what she could possibly see in him for the long term, and certainly nothing to explain why “he gives me more of what I need than anyone else ever has.” Uma Thurman is fine in a thankless/thinkless role, Bryan Greenberg has a nice chest, pouty puppy dog eyes, and virtually no apparent acting ability whatsoever. The relationship is an unconvincing rehash filled with “how many times have we seen this before” moments (The working woman walking in on the ne’r-do-well, beer guzzling lout of a boyfriend who has turned her apartment into a pithole. The painstruck Romeo who gets drunk and sleeps with his girlfriend’s work associate during a brief breakup – hmmm, do you think she’ll find out about the infidelity once they get back together again? The first date that culminates with him jumping the fence of a gated park so they can have a NYC moment on a bench surrounded by trees and grass, lest you think these outdoorsey moments only happen in London romances) and mind numbing dialogue (Him referring to her favorite painting as “luminous” – has anyone ever really used this word before? – later mounting her while offering his sperm as his “gift” because she wants to have a baby are personal favorite moments).

The only thing more ludicrous than the relationship between boy and girl is the relationship between patient and shrink. Stretching all reason and credibility, Streep has convinced herself it is more than ethical to continue working with the woman who is fornicating “on every surface of my apartment” with her son. The conceit has broad comic possibilities, but watching Streep cringe while listening to Thurman talk openly about Greenberg’s “beautiful” penis (“it’s so cute I wanted to knit it a hat”) makes us cringe even more at the stilted wordplay. There is also inherent humor in watching a therapist play out a double standard between her patient and her child, yet there is no continuity of personality or belief system that explains her giggly encouraging a client to get their groove on while becoming grief-stricken because her own offspring dares to date outside of the faith. The humor is arbitrary and flat, and more serious moments don’t hold water. Three actors are performing in three different movies, and there is no sense that they know one another much less care about each another. Supporting caricatures make matter worse, with shticky Jewish grandparents cutting off each other’s sentences and covering their entire home in plasticwrap, and a best friend who breaks up with women by smashing cream pies in their faces – simply the lamest and most misplaced sight gag to appear on film in years.

Especially on the heels of the luminous (see, I can use that word in a sentence too) “In Her Shoes,” which presents a Jewish family in all its eccentric, multi-dimensional, tender glory, this one comes off as crass, phony, and – the greatest sin of all – terribly unfunny.

Strictly for the Borscht belt crowd.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0387514/

In Her Shoes

Grade: A-

A sweet, sincere, precious and – most importantly – honest screenplay combines with first rate performances across the board for one of the best family dramas of the year.

I know my rep – the heartless curmudgeon iconoclast who can’t just go with the flow when movie romance or familial angst is in the air and allow his heartstrings to be strung. The dirty little secret is, when done well, my absolute favorite type of film is the family drama. Most of the time, however, offerings include made for TV melodrama, cliché-ridden phoniness and treacly romantic syrup.

What a pleasure it is when the Real McCoy presents itself.

Cameron Diaz (who knew?) and Toni Collette shine as sisters who hate and resent each other with every fiber of their being, yet love, care and depend on each other so much they can’t stand being separated. One is an underachieving, manipulative, self-absorbed, drunken failure, the other an overachieving, self-conscious, unhappy success. Both lost a mother to mental illness, yet the slim difference in their ages dramatically impacts memory, perception, and the results of such a profound loss on their lives. Witty, charming, sad and tender in equal measure, internalized battles waged from lives of feeling less than – not smart enough, too overweight, not as attractive as, not as beloved in the dysfunctional family hierarchy – play out in ways that any member of any family can identify and personalize.

Shirley MacLaine yet again proves her metal as a fine character actor, here the grandmother cut out of the lives of her family by a father/son-in-law (the equally fine Ken Howard) mourning the loss of his wife, trying to protect his daughters, and struggling to cast off deeply ingrained feelings of personal guilt and blame. Family dissolutions and reunions are portrayed with surprising perceptiveness and veracity, as it is not the facts themselves that differ in the telling but only what they represent to the people telling them. Anyone who has every been to a retirement community south of Jacksonville will recognize the perfection with which director Curtis Hanson depicts this specific way of life, from the shuffle board landscapes to the gossiping biddies and lounging cronies to the pink (yellow in my mother’s community) stucco exteriors everywhere one ganders. But the film goes deeper, capturing the interdependence, loyalty and heart of those with a lifetime of different experience brought together by location, circumstance and need in their waning years.

Mark Feuerstein is adorable and genuine as a Jewish lawyer love interest, Candice Azzara vulnerably hateful as a controlling Jewish stepmother, and Francine Beers delights as a motorized cart-driving Jewish Golden Girl – need it be said this is also a very ethnically-imbued movie? Susannah Grant has written a screenplay filled with real people, situations and flavors we are familiar with without stooping to one-note caricature or tired cliché. If the film is a touch too long and a budding romance blooms a bit too quickly, this is a film of much tenderness and uplifting pleasure. A gem in the rough of similar fare.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0388125/

Good Night, and Good Luck.

Grade: B-

David Strathairn deserves high ratings for his portrayal of TV Newsman Edward R. Murrow, in a film that is beautiful to look at but too stoic and antiseptic for its subject matter.

McCarthyism is in full cold war swing and a chill hangs over the nation. News researchers are terrified that any moment someone will discover the “meeting” a distant relative attended 20 years earlier and their careers will evaporate. Station owners fear the loss of corporate sponsorship and news anchors avoid hard news and walk on eggshells. The Iraqi war marches on, soldiers return in body bags, the President’s incompetence remains unchecked and still reporters don’t report. Then a storm called Katrina devastates Louisiana, and finally the media stands up and takes notice…

That’s another story altogether, yet writer/director/actor George Clooney has not chosen to tell this allegory in this time by mere accident. Sandwiched between a famed speech Morrow delivered on the responsibility of television journalism in a free society, rest assured this film has an important indictment to deliver and a specific ax to grind.

If only the tale itself were a bit more interestingly told.

Wisely allowing Senator Joseph McCarthy to portray Senator Joseph McCarthy, real news footage presents one of our greatest villains in all his oily glory. Shot in stunning black and white, the film matches the footage and catches an era of chain smoking, typewriters clacking and pre-Teleprompter cue cards. The tipping point is reached, and Murrow joins Producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney in an unembellished performance) on a crusade to bring McCarthy to his knees. Nervous executives step aside, the military threatens, Murrow inhales deeply from his cigarette, the countdown to airtime begins, and Friendly literally taps his co-conspirator’s knee with a pen to start speaking. A war between good and evil men finally begins.

The story is a powerful one, yet is told in such a straightforward docudrama style that time stretches and pathos is lacking. Quiet heroes doing their jobs against a monolithic danger is the stuff of Greek drama, yet here attention to detail overwhelms effective storytelling. The film captures a black and white feel of staid innocence in a time of Machiavellian Technicolor, and Strathairn perfectly captures an iconic American figure without caricature, but the story runs its now renowned course without much in the way of context, shading or new enlightenment. Except for the occasional background blues number (sung to perfection by Dianne Reeves) there is no score, adding to the somber, straight-laced and unemotive tone. A side story involving a married couple – no doubt meant to represent a time of fear, suspicion and living in shadow – proves misplaced and rather meaningless.

Still, the telling is important in and of itself, and Clooney is a heartfelt troubadour with a nice cinematic eye and a competent if not compelling storyteller. Gravitas without gravy.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0433383/

Breakfast on Pluto

Grade: F

Or at least that’s where writer/director Neil Jordan is from.

The film follows the exploits of one Patrick “Kitty” Brady, a transgendered male to female. As portrayed by Cillian Murphy, in what can only be described as a drug-induced performance,
Kitty dons wig and one outrageous outfit after another, raises his voice an octave and is insufferably weird for over two hours.

Ecstacy? Crystal Meth? Cocaine?

Your guess is as good as mine, but his eyes are so vacant, his voice so giggly and mumbled, and his performance so non-existent that someone must have been doing something involving a bong on that sound stage. In 37 – count ‘em – 37 chapters that flash on the screen, one more disjointed, meaningless, confused, banal, unfunny, freaky, insufferable and excruciating than the last, Kitty searches for the mother who abandoned her, dresses in a Pocahontas getup and joins a militant rock band, hides rifles from the IRA, becomes a call girl, becomes a magician’s assistant, works as a character in a children’s theme park, gets blown up in a discothèque, takes her friend to an abortion clinic, and is brutally interrogated by the police for a week and then doesn’t want to leave. There is no through line through any of this, nothing that makes the story cohesive or comprehensible, nothing that makes the protagonist interesting, sympathetic, likable or even watchable. We learn absolutely nothing about her beyond a penchant for dresses and make-up, nothing about her relationships to family, friends or assorted oddballs that makes any sense or provides any clarity. Violence erupts at inexplicable moments that are completely detached from anything else going on in the story. Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea repay some old debts in the form of bored cameos.

The film wants so badly to be a quirky John Irving novel brought to life, filled with unique characters and bizarre scenarios. Instead it is an unfinished, unfocused, amateurish and incomprehensible work by a masturbatory filmmaker, perhaps trying to regain some former glory from the last time he had a woman drop her drawers and surprise everyone with a penis in “The Crying Game.”

I spent much of this film calculating the number of seats to my right and left, trying to analyze just how many people I would have to disturb if I made a run for it.

They probably would have appreciated the diversion.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411195/

Separate Lies

Grade: C

British melodrama is a bit of an oxymoron.

A seemingly random incident rips apart the lives of a seemingly happily married couple. Tom Wilkinson rises far above the drab material in this mannered, monochromatic romantic mystery/domestic drama/tear-jerker that tries to be far too adult for its own good. The elements are all laboriously there – the clandestine meetings and sexual rendezvous, mysterious deaths and Camille-like illnesses, umbrella farewells and sun drenched hellos – in a pro forma way that reminds one of #172 in some interchangeable author’s Harlequin romance series. Poor Tom looks longingly into a restaurant where he has a perfect view of the star-crossed lovers breaking his heart, fade to prototypical rain against the windowpane. People howl into handkerchiefs, a sure sign that the story couldn’t even induce the actors to produce real tears. Serving platters are smashed to convey smoldering frustration – just like Sissy Spacek did when she was mad at poor Tom in “In the Bedroom.” This guy induces much china breaking for some unknown reason.

The pieces all fit together neatly and uninterestingly, piano music crescendos whenever one is expected to feel a heightened sense of tragic emotion that never really occurs. Emily Watson and Rupert Everett are so completely monotone in inflection and performance they belong together, although what passion actually ignites between these two dullards is anyone’s guess. Surprising revelations are neither surprising nor revelatory, yet through it all Wilkinson imbues quietly pained dignity, Dudley Doright goodness and upper crust fussbudget stuffiness into an underwritten role (think Anthony Hopkins in “Remains of the Day,” the sort of film this one aspires to). The fact that we care at all is a testament to a huge talent surmounting writer/director Julian Fellowes’ recycled screenplay.

These are exceedingly flat, skin-deep, boring people. A nap, anyone?

More Movie Info: http://chevy.imdb.com/title/tt0369053/