Reviews

This is a variant of what I call a Three Girls movie. In a Three Girls Movie, three young women learn about life, which is to say actually about men, and some or all of them find love and a happy ending. There's always the heroine, the naif, who often gets hurt, and a third who is either wild or salty. Three Coins In A Fountain, The Best Of Everything, and Where The Boys Are are more or less contemporary examples to this; Mystic Pizza is a later version.

Here the twist is that the Three Girls are grown women -- successful models in their 20s -- who think that they are fully wised up about life and men. Their plan is to rent a swank apartment that they can't afford and use it as a base of operations to catch rich husbands. It turns out that two of the three are surprised by love, and the most self assured and worldly wise of them by a double surprise.

The three gorgeous actresses -- Bacall, Monroe and Grable -- make it fun to watch. There are a couple of enjoyable bits -- one where a cheating husband is caught out despite all his precautions because his is the 50 millionth car to cross the George Washington Bridge, and one where Monroe's gorgeous but extremely nearsighted character falls into good fortune by refusing to wear her glasses. There are a couple of cute inside jokes, one about Grable's real life husband and one about Bacall's.

But on the whole it moves very slowly, padded with too many long establishing shots designed to show the 50s audience either the wondrous glamour of New York or the airline that paid for a product placement. The surprise ending is telegraphed way too early, and it depends on Bacall's character, who is supposed to be both shrewd and mercenary, failing to do a little research about the man who is pursuing her. The ending feels hurried and perfunctory.

It's ok and moderate fun, but hardly a classic. If you want to see Monroe at the top of her game, watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes instead.

At the outset I was looking forward to it for two reasons: (i) I know the story well, and (ii) Ronan and Robie are two of the best young actresses working today. But notwithstanding the feminist director and the diversity casting gimmick, this looks like the same old sexist romantic hogwash.

Ever since Schiller's Maria Stuart, writers of historical fiction have sympathized with Mary's emotion driven bad choices, while trashing Elizabeth I as a cold, vain, barren shrew who denied her female nature in order to rule. Never mind that old Liz was a far better and more successful politician than any of the Stuarts, two of whom were driven into exile and two of whom got their heads cut off. (That's 3, not 4 -- Mary managed both.) Never mind that Elizabeth completely dominated her male advisors and made sure they never forgot she was Henry VIII's daughter. Never mind that Mary lost her head for conspiring to have Elizabeth murdered so that she could become queen and return England to the true Catholic faith. Never mind, most of all, that Elizabeth's Parliamentary and Protestant state is the ancestor of American institutions, that the Stuarts were absolutists and either outright or crypto-Catholics, and that our Anglo-American ideas of liberty and constitutional government were developed in reaction to what the Stuarts tried and failed to achieve. No, all that matters is that Mary is a tragic figure who acted on her feelings, like a woman is supposed to, instead of using brains, foresight and self-control like Elizabeth did.

This movie is more of the same, only with the third wave feminist twist that both women were oppressed because the patriarchy didn't allow them to wield power and be true to their female selves at the same time.

This product of a late 1960s sensibility (it came out in '72) has as its major joke that the Founding Fathers were as human as we are -- they ate gluttonously, drank to excess, went to the outhouse at inconvenient times, told dirty jokes, mocked and lost their tempers with one another, and had trouble making up their minds. It has as its secondary joke that Thomas Jefferson couldn't get his mind on writing the Declaration of Independence after six month of abstinence until it was arranged that he could have sex with his wife. It has several tuneful numbers, well sung by musical comedy pros. While Franklin (Howard daSilva), Adams (William Daniels) and Jefferson (Ken Howard) are the central figures, all of the supporting characters are vivid and strongly drawn. As Edmund Rutledge of South Carolina, John Cullum (best known for Northern Exposure) has a standout number, "The Triangular Trade," that denounces Northern hypocrisy about slavery and the slave trade. There are some minor anachronisms,but it is substantially true to the historical record. A pleasant two hours on the afternoon of a locked down 4th of July.

Half of this movie is a pleasant enough romantic fantasy of a love affair between two intelligent, mature adults, the widower President and an environmental lawyer-lobbyist. Unfortunately, the other half is a ham handed liberal political fantasy about the Bill Clinton we wished we had instead of the Bill Clinton we actually got.

Michael Douglas plays rock-like decency. Annette Benning, who usually portrays formidable women, is required to act almost girlishly shy in the first stages of the relationship. Martin Sheen, warming up for The West Wing, plays the Chief of Staff.

The high point of the movie, though not intended as such, is a meeting of senior White House staff who have decided that the President's new romance is causing political trouble and that Something Must Be Done. Michael J. Fox opens the meeting by demanding assurance that they won't even think about discussing anything potentially illegal, "because it's always the guy in my job who winds up doing 18 months in Danbury"

What can you say about a movie where an adorable little girl looks Cameron Diaz up and down and says very gravely, in a posh English accent, "You look like one of my Barbies." In my opinion this is Nancy Meyers's best piece of work. She gets terrific performances from all four romantic leads, the two little girls, and Eli Wallach as a Jewish fairy godmother. Diaz and Law seem like they should obviously fall into bed together. You have to suspend a bit of disbelief at the Winslett-Black couple, but Meyers does a superb job of bringing Winslett plausibly down to Black's level, both in the writing of the character and in physical appearance. Everybody who belongs together gets together, after overcoming obstacles that are entirely within themselves. And, as usual in a Nancy Meyers movie, the interiors are gorgeous.

Since this is a political movie, I'm going to comment on it from a political perspective. Carlson, Kelly and the fictitious Kayla were all fine with short skirts and glass top desks. They all wanted to work for an enterprise that advocated all day every day that a toad like Roger Ailes or his master Rupert Murdoch is the highest type of humanity, who had earned the right to do as he pleased with his inferiors. Their employer disapproved of the laws prohibiting sexual extortion on principle, and they knew it and went along for as long as they could. They were all good, loyal servants of the patriarchy until it asked for 110% loyalty. What happened to them then resembles what happened to all of those good, true-believing Communists who Stalin shot or sent to the Gulag in 1937-39 because they were loyal to the idea and the system but not quite loyal enough to him personally.

Of all the real, as opposed to fictional characters in the movie,the only one I had any sympathy for is Nancy Erika Smith, a hard nosed plaintiff's lawyer who has spent her whole life fighting and beating people like Ailes. Without Smith or an equally skilled employment lawyer, Carlson would have been rolled over by the Fox News litigatin machine. But then, there's nothing glamourous about her, so she got very little room, or credit, in a story about right wing blondes who supposedly saw the light.

Ailes deserved what he got, and worse. Like Cardinal Wolsey or Thomas Cromwell, he served a capricious, egotistical absolute monarch to the best of his malignant ability and thought he deserved gratitude. Instead, when he was no longer useful to the king, off with his head. Only metaphroically, though.

Superb. Not a weak performance, except for Timothy Chalamet, who never outgrows being a pretty boy. (Perhaps Amy will man him up). Saoirse Ronan is an ideal Jo, full of intelligence, courage, pride and temperament. Amy finally gets to have her side of the story fairly heard, though not necessarily agreed with, instead of being the vain, shallow quasi-villain she's usually seen as. (I hope this is Florence Pugh's breakout role; she deserves it.) And Gerwig's idea of turning the book inside out, putting the second half in present time and telling the first through Jo's flashbacks, is in my opinion brilliant, because it puts the focus on the women that the March girls grew up to be.

This movie plays much better now than it did when it was made 22 years ago. The character of Evita is a Kardashian who went into politics, offering the poor content-free populism combined with vicarious luxury and impulsive, haphazard charity. Her message to the adoring masses is, "I am just like you, only more so, so live through me." It worked in Argentina then. It works in the US of A today.

Aside from the fact that snobby upper class people don't like Evita, we don't get any sense of political context. You need to know a little Argentine history to know that Peron gained his popularity by being the pro-union Minister of Labor under a revolving door military junta. Only then do the brief packing house scenes make any sense. And the movie gives no idea of what Peron thought he was trying to accomplish economically or why he failed. Webber and Parker aren't interested in anything except the dynamics of Evita's celebrity.

Unfortunately, Madonna is the hole in the center of the movie. Her performance as the title character "sleeping" her way to the top in a patriarchy where men control everything is wooden, her voice thin, and her sufferings at the end completely uninvolving.

Two things make the movie worth watching. First, the ensemble numbers and crowd scenes -- Good Night and Thank You, The Government We Deserve, Peron's Newest Flame and The New Argentina have great vitality. Second, Banderas is wonderful as Che. That's a common Argentine nickname, and Parker wrote the character as an Argentine everyman instead of Castro's bearded sidekick. It works. Whether he's a janitor, a worker, a demonstrator, a newspaper reporter or one of the rich, Banderas brings off the role of running commentator with great panache, powerful singing, and just enough of an accent (those rolling Rs in Casa Rrrrrrosada).

And there's one good line. As she's pushing past a crowd of leftist demonstrators in Italy, Evita angrily asks the Argentine ambassador, "Did you hear that? They called me a whore" He replies calmly, "It's an easy mistake. They still call me Admiral even though I left the sea long ago."

That was my reaction. Parasite starts as a sardonic black comedy about the relations between a poor family and a rich one in present day Seoul before veering off in an entirely unexpected, much darker, almost surreal direction.

The protagonists are the impoverished Kim family. Dad is a Micawber like optimistic fatalist, who has failed at numerous jobs but always expects something to turn up. Mom is solid and practical, a one-time high school track star, who keeps things together. The mid-20s daughter and college-age son are smart, quick, glib and nervy, willing to do whatever it takes, but they don't seem to have found their footing. They don't always agree, but they stick together.

The Kims live in a cramped, squalid basement apartment in the kind of neighborhood where drunks piss in the street. The scrape up a little money folding boxes for neighborhood pizzeria, none too competently. As we meet them, they have just lost free wi-fi because the neighbor upstairs has passworded her router. Dad advises the kids to hold their phones up and move around the apartment to see if they can catch a signal. They do, up on the ledge where the toilet sits. That's Dad's strategy for life in a nutshell.

Deliverance arrives in the form of Son's high school buddy Min, now in college. Min has a gig tutoring English to the 15 year old daughter of a very rich family. He's going to study abroad for a year, and he wants Son to hold his place till he gets back. Min intends to start dating the girl when she's old enough, and he figures Son will be a harmless substitute. Son did well on the English part of the college entrance exam, and Min assures him that he can bs his way through.

The rich family, named Park, live in a gorgeous, spacious modern mansion on a hill, formerly the home of a renowned modern architect who has since moved on to bigger things in Paris. The father is the kind of Korean global businessman who has been the subject of an admiring profile in the New York Times. Mrs. Park is described by Min as "slow," which isn't quite right. She's an oblivious but nice lady, more ornamental than useful, who depends on a middle aged housekeeper and who dotes on and spoils her hyperactive 8 year old son. You might call her street dumb. The same is true of her husband, who knows his way around business but is not as worldly wise as he thinks he is.

The Parks are insulated from the realities of everyday life by a thick cushion of money, and they think the world works the way it's supposed to. Park is always concerned that the family servants "don't cross the line" into familiarity. He and his wife assume that anything American is automatically first class and, to show their sophistication, they pepper their Korean conversation with scraps of English the way Miss Piggy uses French.

With the help of a diploma forged by Daughter Kim on Photoshop, Son aces his interview with Mrs. Park and gets hired to give English lessons 2 or 3 afternoons a week. In short order, he and the girl are also making out when Mom's back is turned. Son sees the boy's weird paintings pinned up on the fridge. He suggests to Mrs. Park that the boy could use art therapy and that he just happens to know an American trained art therapist. Mrs. Park swallows the bait, Daughter Kim bluffs her way through the interview with a combination of arrogance and art therapy buzz words she's picked up on the internet, and in short order she's having regular sessions with the little boy. Now that they're through the Parks' gate, the Kim kids manipulate things so that the chauffeur gets fired and is replaced by Dad, and the housekeeper gets fired and is replaced by Mom. They never let on that they're all related. The Parks don't have a clue. When the little boy notices that the new driver smells just like his art teacher, Mr. Park brushes it off because all the people who ride the subway smell the same."

At the halfway point, this has just been an amusing and quite enjoyable story of the clever, scrappy poor putting one over on the clueless, entitled rich. The Kims are making a very good living off the Parks and eating better than they have in a long time. Of course we know that the Kims will somehow screw up this honeypot and be threatened with discovery and disaster. Things do spiral out of control, but in a completely unexpected way. I can't say how without a major spoiler; let's just say that the Park mansion conceals some extraordinary secrets and that the injuries that the Kims have inflicted come back to haunt them. Their struggle to stave off detection starts as slapstick but gets more and more desperate, and it builds to a climax that you don't see coming but is completely foreshadowed and leaves you wrung out. Definitely worth it.

One sidelight for American viewers. Mr. Kim and one other character have each gone broke in the "Taiwanese Cake" business. I googled that. It turns out that there is a pattern in South Korean life of fads giving rise to a large number number of opportunistic but undercapitalized small businesses that fail when the fad runs its course. Taiwanese Cake was one of them, the equivalent of the US cupcake fad of 10 years ago.

A wise man once said that a plantation is just a concentration camp with a prettier front office. That's why Harriet seemeed to be such a familiar movie. We're all used to seeing Third Reich resistance movies that involve extrarordinary idealists hiding from and tricking the Nazis and their collaborators, unexpected sympathizers, false papers, narrow escapes, and, in the better ones, a smart and motivated villain who understands exactly what he's doing and believes in it. This is that movie, except that instead of SS men with tommy guns we have everyday white Americans wearing "U.S. Marshal" badges and carrying Colt revolvers. Its a worthwhile reminder that until the Civil War slavery was the law, that it had the power of the federal government behind it, that it was founded on violence, and that large numbers of white Americans believed it was essential and right and were willing to kill and die to preserve it.

This is also a vindicated Cassandra movie. Like the heroine of Zero Dark Thirty, Tubman is patronized by well meaning men who sympathize with her cause but don't take her seriously and mistakenly believe that they know better because she is only a woman. The heroine defies their advice that she doesn't know what she's doing, goes her own way, proves them wrong and then makes them admit it.

It has the usual artistic license of movies on historical subjects, compressing and simplifying events and adding drama. Fine performnce from the lead actress, and solid work from everyone else in the cast, who seem to believe in the project instead of phoning it in for a paycheck. It's a good afternoon's entertainment, and it may provoke some viewers to go learn Tubman's actual story, but it won't be remembered 5 years hence.

One of the contemporary reviews of this movie called it first class romantic schlock, which is a compliment because that's exactly what novelist Nicholas Sparks and director Nick Cassavetes set out to create. McAdams and Gosling at the outset of their career as leads have excellent chemistry as the young lovers, and Garner and Rowlands are a couple of solid old pros in the framing story. The high point is what Cher, in Clueless, would have called a "major boinkfest" as desire long deferred is finally consummated, followed up a major confession that transforms your view of the villain of the piece. The ending is strictly by the numbers.

As a piece of inspiration and moral instrruction for the folks at home, this is far inferior to either Mrs. Miniver or The Fighting Sullivans. A very talented cast struggles gamely with a ham-handed script and overwrought direction. As Ann Hilton, Claudette Colbert is way too emotional as the upper middle class wife of an advertising executive who chucked his job to volunteer for the Army. She's portrayed as completely unstrung by his departure and as initially helpless inside her bubble of privilege. I can't help comparing the role as written unfavorably with the way I visualize Myrna Loy's Millie Stevenson having coped with the same situation while Al was away, before the beginning of The Best Years of Our Lives. Jennifer Jones's burgeoning and barely controlled sexuality as Jane, the older daughter. is similarly over the top, compared with Teresa Wright's cool, sensible Peggy Stevenson. Joseph Cotten's man about town Navy officer and family friend emits almost the full too clever by half serial killer vibe he had in Shadow of a Doubt, and his "Uncle Tony" relationship with Jane, who keeps throwing him none too subtle invitations, is as sexually cringe-worthy as his uncle-niece relationship with Wrignt in Shadow. Hattie McDaniel is stuck in another broadly played faithful maid role, right down to the name Fidelia, but then Hollywood never allowed her to do anything else. The script hits every patriotic beat required -- taking in a boarder, growing a victory garden, volunteering for war work, eschewing the black market -- with Agnes Moorehead as the snobbish exemplar of what not to think, say and do. The nice young men you can see will be killed duly are, to the grief of the women left behind and the service of the plot, and the same is true of the ones you know have to survive. It perfectly suited the taste of the time, but unlike The Fighting Sullivans, Mrs. Miniver, and the Best Years of Our Lives -- which are also true to the values of their day -- it has dated badly and is only of historical interest.

Well made but ultimately disappointing because it defies the expectations for this kind of movie. John McClane never shows up, and we aren't even given the kind of desperate, suicidal resistance of the passengers in United 93. Instead, the characters with which the American audience identifies -- which is to say the rich, mostly Western, mostly white ones -- behave all too much like real life. They sneak about in fear and confusion, and when caught by the frighteningly well supplied murderers, they are either killed outright or herded about passively at gunpoint. The only act of defiance by one is late and futile. The guests who survive do so mostly by chance or by slipping out the back way pointed out by the Indian staff.

The movie does make the young murderers seem human without "humanizing" them. Through the cell phone voice of their commander safe in Pakistan, we are never in any doubt that they are driven by seething resentment and have been thoroughly taught to see all non-Muslims as subhumans to be killed without remorse. Nonetheless, small bits of business show them to be all too believable young men rather than robots. One plays a practical joke on his partner involving room service food. Another is such a puritan that, despite his commander's orders, he can't bring himself to put his hand inside the bra of a woman he has murdered in order to retrieve her identity papers. A third calls his family on the cell phone -- they are proud of what he is doing, he is concerned that they haven't yet been paid the money they were promised for him doing it. We are reminded that they are all too human.

Transit is based on a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers, in turn based on her experiences as a German Jewish Communist political refugee in Marseilles trying to get out of Vichy France to Mexico. The protagonist is a German illegally in France, who travels from Paris to Marseilles, through chance assumes the identity of a dead German leftist writer who has an exit visa to Mexico, and finds himself involved with both the writer's estranged wife and the wife and son of a fellow German illegal.

What made the movie work for me is that it is not a routine World War II vintage costume drama. Director-Writer Christian Petzold has chosen to set the entire story in present day France. There are no Nazis, no swastikas, and no political explanations. There are only the omnipresent French police checking papers in the street, raiding hotels and apartments, and rounding up illegal aliens for deportation to an unnamed destination, assisted by good French citizens either venal or patriotic, and the desperate struggle of the refugees to procure legitimate identity and travel documents in the face of bureaucratic indifference or hostility. It all feels like it could be happening six months from now, there or, for that matter, here. The contemporary setting greatly increases the tension by taking away historical cues -- you have no idea how it is going to come out or whether the hero will make his getaway to Mexico.

A pleasant 90 minute entertainment competently done. I kept laughing almost to the end despite the increasingly convoluted reversals. The comic tone was well maintained, which isn't as easy as it looks. Because it's a Warner Brothers production, it helps to think of it as a live action Looney Tunes, which is why the sometimes painful injuries that characters suffer repeatedly seem to have no consequences two minutes later. Plemmons was brilliantly creepy. Bateman and McAdams will never make anyone forget William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series, but they have excellent chemistry together, and the last shot foreshadows a sequel if the grosses are high enough.

Protag (Gemma Arterton) is a young woman in 1940 London. She's living with an artist who isn't bringing in that much, so she gets a government typing job. They send her to the Ministry of Information to type scripts for short propaganda films of the "don't waste food" genre. She becomes a screenwriter because the men who run the unit decide they need a "woman's viewpoint" to make their scripts more effective. She's smart and ambitious and becomes a real contributor. When she reads a newspaper item about two spinster sisters who took their fishing boat to Dunkirk, she decides that this would make a great story for a full length propaganda feature, and she goes down to the coast to interview the sisters.

Of course, what really happened is nothing like the news story, but no matter. She works up a treatment, sells it in the pitch meeting, and keeps working on revisions as it gets made. In addition to the crap she has to take because she's a woman, there are the usual problems. The actor cast to play the drunken uncle for comic relief (Bill Nighy) is a once popular matinee idol whose ego won't accept that he's now a has been. They have to work a dog into the script. The Ministry of Information decides that they need an American character to sell the picture in the US, so they have to figure out how to plausibly get a Yank to Dunkirk. (They make him a war correspondent covering the British Army.) To play him, the Ministry sends them an American RAF pilot who is knee-buckling handsome but has never acted before. One after another, the script problems are overcome and the production moves forward. You can see from the bits of movie within a movie that it's a real piece of cheese, and no Mrs. Miniver, but it suits the times and is a popular and commercial success.

Like Day For Night and State and Main, it's a valentine to the business of making movies that shows you how much intelligence and effort goes into even hack work.