SYNOPSIS: In “It Ends with Us,” a new domestic abuse drama based on the bestseller of the same name by Colleen Hoover, and now playing in theatres, Blake Lively plays Lily, a young woman who relocates to Boston to find a new life, and romance with wealthy neurosurgeon Ryle (Justin Baldoni). When the ghosts of the past revisit themselves on her new relationship, Lily must take control and take charge of her own destiny.
CAST: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj. Directed by Justin Baldoni.
REVIEW: “It Ends with Us” raises issues of the lingering, intergenerational effects of domestic abuse but is let down by its uncomplicated portrayal of the complex dynamics that motivate the characters. The film’s cycles of abuse themes are provocative, but director Baldoni (who also stars as Ryle), and screenwriter Christy Hall blunt the story’s impact by not digging deep enough. Abuse is a thorny, ugly subject, and nobody wants to see explicit representations of it on screen, but “It Ends with Us,” while well-meaning, simplifies the issue to the point of melodrama. Sincere melodrama, but melodrama none the less.
Lively is compelling as Lily, and her performance brings with it, when appropriate to the situation, heaping helpings of charm, warmth and courage. She nicely cast, as is Isabela Ferrer who plays young Lily in the flashback scenes. Ferrer not only looks like Lively but brings the same range to the role.
As Ryle’s sister and Lily’s BFF Allysa, Jenny Slate is also a welcome presence.
(MILD SPOILER ALERT) In theory Ryle is a walking contradiction. Charming and successful, he’s also a bit of a stalker with a violent streak. He’s a healer who breaks things when he gets angry. Baldoni plays him with a thin skin, as a man guided by his passions, for better and for worse.
Trouble is, the relationship at the heart of the film, between Lily and Ryle, always feels at arm’s length. Their meet-cute yearns to have a charming cat-and-mouse vibe, but other than some low-wattage sparkle, they don’t display a great deal of chemistry in this extended scene.
It doesn’t help that screenwriter Hall inserts exposition that is meant to be the kind of “naked truth telling” used so effectively in her movie “Daddio.” Unfortunately, the revelations feel less like “get to know you” confessions than hints of things to come later in the film.
When “It Ends with Us” takes a dramatic turn in its second hour, the stakes are raised and the culture of abuse themes come into focus, but over-all it feels padded by slo-motion montages (scored to the ironically named “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex), Hallmark style dialogue and romance movie clichés. Still, it’s hard not to root for Lily as Lively guides her on her emotional journey.
Imagine learning that the plane crash that claimed your family wasn’t an accident but a covered-up terrorist attack. You would be angry and perhaps hungry for revenge but few would go to the lengths as “The Rhythm Section’s” Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) in her search for justice. “I’ll find the people who did this,” she says. “I’ll kill every last one of them.”
Like so many people touched by unimaginable tragedy Patrick turns to drugs and alcohol to blunt the simmering wellspring of emotion that always seems ready to bubble over. In the three years since her family perished in a plane crash she has been pushed to the edge, despondent, leading a life of survivor guilt—she was supposed to be on the plane—and rage. “I have nothing left,” she says.
When a journalist tells her the crash was actually a case of terrorism and not mechanical failure or an act of God she springs into action, morphing from down ‘n out to knock ‘em out; part La Femme Nikita, part Lisbeth Salander. “I’ve been dying for three years,” she says to one of her victims. “For you it will only be a few minutes.”
Revenge dramas should be snappy. They should bring the viewer into the story, give them a reason to care about the vengeance but most of all they should be satisfying. Each act of retribution should give our dark sides an electrifying jolt. Unfortunately, “The Rhythm Section” misses each and everyone of these beats. The boilerplate script combined with slack pacing and predictable twists and turns are prettied up with an indie movie sheen but there’s not much here beyond some hand held theatrics and exotic locations.
Lively throws vanity out the window, making the most of an underwritten character. Unlike many other movies in this genre, she isn’t an instant super-spy. She’s jittery, struggling with the job of revenge, which, if we cared about what was happening on screen, might have been a nice twist on the usual insta-spy genre.
For all its style “The Rhythm Section” feels like the victim of a ruthless paring down. The story is truncated without enough information to get invested in the characters. A glimpse or two of Stephanie’s life before the plane crash—the o-so-brief flashbacks don’t count—would have deepened our connection to her and her pain so later, when the going gets rough, we would still be paying attention.
The name Paul Feig is closely associated with comedy but with “A Simple Favor” he takes a step away from the laughs to present a story of intrigue and suspense that begins with a friend asking for a little help.
The labyrinthine plot begins with Stephanie (Anna Kendrick), the plucky single mom of a young son. She’s a keener, a food vlogger who is always the first to volunteer for everything at her son’s school. When she meets Emily (Blake Lively), the blunt talking mother of her son’s schoolmate, she is smitten. Stephanie is lonely, a widower who pours herself into work and her son’s life. With Emily she discovers the pleasures of pouring a martini in the afternoon as a “reset” for the day. The pair bond almost immediately despite Emily’s warning, “You do not want to be friends with me, trust me.”
When Emily asks Stephanie for the “simple favour,” of picking her son up after school, the eager mom agrees. Trouble is, Emily disappears into the great wide open, leaving Stephanie stuck with a child and grieving husband (Henry Golding). As she struggles to find closure and poke around in the corners of Emily’s life she discovers her friend wasn’t quite the person she thought she was. “Secrets are like margarine,” Steph says, “easy to spread but bad for the heart.”
From here the film deep dives into a twisty-turny story of intrigue, misplaced love and insurance scams.
Midway through Stephanie asks, “Are you trying to Diabolique me?” It’s a call back to a 1955 psychological thriller that saw terrible people plan a murder while maintaining a perfect alibi. There are missing bodies and other comparisons to “A Simple Favor” but the similarities end there. Feig gets great performances from Kendrick and Lively but is a bit too leisurely in getting into the meat of the matter.
The opening scenes of the friendship building between the two women sparkle. Kendrick is wide eyed and naïve, with just a hint of the darkness that may lie beneath her perfectly manicured soccer mom exterior. By comparison Lively is an exotic beast, decked out in designer clothes and perfectly tousled main of blonde hair. Her candour puts Stephanie and the audience off balance. She loves her son Nikki, but money woes occupy her mind. Despite living in a rand home with all the amenities she’s on the verge of bankruptcy. “The nicest thing I could do for Nikki,” she says, “is blow my brains out.” Their friendship always seemed unconventional but Emily’s frankness hints at what is to come.
That’s the good stuff. From there “A Simple Favor” becomes a maze of good and bad intentions, fake outs, incest and gaslighting. Motivations shift and the twists pile up as the plot takes a darker tone. Trouble is, it takes too long to get where it is going. The interplay between the characters remains enjoyable but as they become increasingly unreliable narrators the story feels convoluted and stretched.
In this mixed-up, shook-up world there are fewer and fewer things we can count on as absolutes. One of them is that there will be a new Woody Allen movie every year with a jaunty jazz soundtrack and credits written in the Windsor Light Condensed font. His new film, “Café Society,” the story of a frantic young romantic trying to find himself in 1930s Hollywood, is slice of comfort cinema with all of Allen’s trademarks intact.
Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) is a native New Yorker who jumped coasts to take up in Los Angeles. The slightly neurotic east coaster is not a natural fit in Tinsel Town, but his powerhouse uncle Phil (Steve Carell) helps out, giving him a job at his powerhouse talent agency and introducing him to a beautiful secretary named Vonnie (Kristen Stewart). By day he does odd jobs for Phil—“Menial errands are my specialty,” Bobby says, “but I don’t see a great future in it.”—while on the weekends he slowly falls for Vonnie. They share a disdain for industry talk and Hollywood’s catty innuendo and a love of cheap Mexican food but she doesn’t share his feelings. Unfortunately (for Bobby) Vonnie has a mostly absent boyfriend.
Enter romantic plot complications and Bobby hightails it back to New York where he goes into the nightclub business with his gangster brother Ben (Corey Stall). Finally successful, he marries and has a child with Veronica (Blake Lively), who he nicknames Vonnie, betraying the feelings he harbours for his west coast love. When Vonnie number one returns to New York for a visit the film offers up a line that sums the situation up, “Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer.”
A light-hearted tapestry, “Café Society” is embroidered with the odd punch line and hints of melancholy. It’s a comedy tinted with heartbreak, a look at true love and unsatisfactory options. It returns Allen to the fertile ground he ploughed with “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” and while this film isn’t a classic on those terms, it’s an engaging look at life and love buoyed by great performances.
Eisenberg does the best Woody Allen impression we’ve seen on screen in some time, but there’s more to him than simply aping the master. His journey from nebbish to notable is believable and gives the movie its heart.
Co-star Stewart hands in what may be her first truly adult role. She plays Vonnie as level-headed in a sea of dreamers. When Bobby describes Joan Crawford as “larger-than-life” she replies, simply but compellingly, “I think I’d be happier life-sized.” It’s the line that sums up her character and Stewart makes the most of it and Vonnie.
“Café Society” is a welcome uptick after Allen’s last two films, “Magic in the Moonlight” and “Irrational Man.” For Woody’s fans it may feel familiar but in the most soothing of ways.
Former “Gossip Girl” actor Blake Lively not only stars in “The Shallows,” she appears in virtually every frame of the film.As a woman surfing alone off an isolated island, she is attacked by a Great White shark and must use her wits to get to safety. Vanity Fair dubbed it, “Lively or Death.” The screenplay appeared on the 2014 Blacklist, the annual list of the “most liked” unmade scripts in Hollywood, and has been described as “Jaws” meets “127 Hours,” but the woman vs. nature struggle sounds more like Blake’s “Castaway” to me.
Lively is Nancy Adams, a medical school drop-out spending an idyllic day hanging ten on a secret Mexican beach recommended to her by her late mom. “What did you say the name of this place was?” she asks a local. “This is paradise,” he coos. Beautiful and remote, it seems perfect for a restful and relaxing day, but trouble soon comes to paradise when she is stranded on a rock two hundred feet from shore. As an experienced surfer Nancy should be able to make it back to the beach easily. Unfortunately there is a toothy, bloodthirsty Great White shark looming between her and safety. “I’m not dying here,” she grunts while forming a plan to avoid becoming shark bait.
The Great White in “The Shallows” makes the shark in “Jaws” seem laid-back. Seemingly inexhaustible in his hunt for humanoid tartar, he is a constant menace to the lithe Lively. It’s one long nautical nightmare for Nancy as she plots to outsmart and outswim her finned tormenter.
Cinematically it’s not as much of a nightmare. The setup is minimal, and as far as actual thrills go, less isn’t more in this case. Less is actually less. There are some moments of tension—Spielberg trained us that any underwater shot pointed up at a swimmer or surfer means impending doom—but too much of the film involves Nancy and her seagull sidekick marooned on the rock.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra occasionally embraces the film’s b-movie ascetic—he actually has the shark go airborne in one spectacular attack—but mostly he’s willing to treat the look of the film like a “Sports Illustrated” layout with vengeful sharks. He does use some effective tricks—we don’t see much of the shark until late into the film and one grizzly scene spares us the bloody details by focussing on Lively’s horrified face rather than the action—but the Nature v Nancy storyline isn’t amped up enough to for us to care if she becomes fish food or not.
The new Blake Lively movie The Age of Adaline sees its star play a woman who was frozen in time at age twenty-nine, never to age another day. No laugh lines, stiffness in the bones or grey hair for her. She drifts through life, an eternal twenty-something as her pals age and eventually die.
How does she compare to friends and family? Well, in the film the youthful centenarian Lively has a daughter played by Ellen Burstyn, a veteran actress fifty-five years her co-star’s senior.
It’s a romantic fantasy that brings up an interesting question. Sure, the idea of defying age sounds intriguing, but why would you want to fall in love when there is no possibility of growing old together? That’s the dreamy question at the heart of the film; the notion that allows director Lee Toland Krieger to explore the mushier side of the story, but what about the engine that drives the tale—immortality?
With characters like Wolverine and Edward Cullen pulling in big box office bucks it’s not shocking that movies seem infatuated with eternal life. Nor should it come as a shock that actors are drawn to immortal characters. The obsession with youth is one thing, that’s a job requirement—perhaps that’s why the USA, with Los Angeles at the epicenter, is the world capitol of plastic surgery—but I think it goes beyond that.
With visions of an ageless Adaline dancing in my head I posed a simple question to Alex Garland, the director and screenwriter of this weekend’s artificial intelligence drama Ex Machina: “Why have movies about immortality been so popular with actors and filmmakers?” I got an intriguing answer.
“There is an interest floating around which is as much to do with longevity, as it is immortality,” he said, “but it contains immortality as a long-term goal.
“Broadly speaking what I would say, at least where filmmakers are concerned, is that they’re subject to the same zeitgeist things that everybody else is so what they will do is manifest it in their job.”
Perhaps that’s why in the coming months we’ll see eternal characters in everything from The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Terminator Genisys to Pan and Crimson Peak.
The rich and famous have always dreamed of extending natural life. For instance, although it’s an urban legend that Walt Disney was frozen cryogenically to be thawed later it makes a good and almost true sounding story. While doing working on Ex Machina Garland says he discovered tales of wealthy people looking to find immortality through science.
“The researchers might be quite realistic about what artificial intelligence can promise but the funders may be less realistic about it. One of the things that some of the funders are looking for, and I’ve heard this expressed very explicitly, not in a coded way but an absolutely straightforward way, is the ability to download yourself and for you to survive long as a result of your enormous wealth.
“Powerful people don’t want to die. Everyone else figures they don’t have a choice but the really powerful people figure they do have a choice and they are going to explore it just in case.”
I think Hollywood may be obsessed with immortality for one other reason. Film stock offers it’s own kind of eternity, where one never ages and on the screen Blake Lively will be the twenty-nine-year-old Adaline forever.
“The Age of Adaline,” a new romantic fantasy starring Blake Lively, asks a simple question: Is falling in love worth the trouble when there is no chance of growing old together?
Love, and almost everything else is tricky for Adaline Bowman (Lively). For nearly eight decades she has been frozen at age 29. Her daughter (Ellen Burstyn) looks like her grandmother while Adaline has been immune to the ravages of time. Over the years she has become closed off, rarely making friends and never dating lest she be found out and experimented on to discover the secret of eternal youth. Every ten years she moves, changes her identity and starts all over again.
Just days before a move from San Francisco to Oregon, her life is thrown off schedule when she meets Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), a handsome philanthropist who falls in love with her at first sight. Despite her better judgment she becomes involved with him, but as their relationship deepens a revelation threatens to reveal the truth about her strange life.
“Age of Adaline” is a movie that requires a serious leap of faith on the part of the viewer. It’s ripe with Nicholas Sparks style clichés—a woman who never thought she’d love again finds happiness, but at what cost?—and fantastical elements that would even test even Ponce de León’s belief in eternal youth.
Then there is a plot twist of sorts. They’ll be no spoilers here, but suffice to say Adaline has had a complicated love life and the repercussions of decades old romances echo through time affecting her present day relationship. It’s a weird turn that dips into creepy/absurd territory and is an unsatisfying climax to the film.
On the upside Lively is, well, lively, bringing pathos and vulnerability to Adaline. Her mannered speech sounds right for someone who came of age in a different time and she almost manages to pull off most of the film’s groaner dialogue. There’s a laugh in her voice when a random himbo tries to throw her a line, and then embarrassed says, “I guess you’ve heard that before…” “I have,” she giggles, “from a young Bing Crosby… type.” It’s a cheeseball line, but she pulls it off… barely.
“The Age of Adaline” is a silly movie that requires an almost impossible level of suspension of disbelief but somehow the metaphysical melodrama, with its lovely design and strong performances over comes the ridiculous plotlines to become an almost timeless romance.
The old maxim, “never judge a book by its cover” could have been coined to describe Pippa Lee. When we first meet her at age fifty she’s the very picture of composure, a well put together spouse to her much older husband. Of course, the journey to becoming Pippa Lee, trophy wife, is far more interesting than the well manicured facade she presents to friends, family, and even, most of the time, to herself. “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” the new film starring Robin Wright Penn in the title role, takes the viewer on the wild ride that is (and was) Pippa’s life.
We first get to know the middle aged Pippa, devoted wife of Herb Lee (Alan Arkin). He’s thirty years her senior and in a move to make a “pre-emptive strike against decrepitude,” he and Pippa leave New York for a retirement home. There her life begins to fall apart, and in a series of flashbacks we learn about her mother—a hopped up Maria Bello—her drug tinged wild young life—as portrayed by Blake Lively—and even a kinky photo session with her aunt’s lover. As her life unwinds, she finds security in the most unlikely of places—with the troubled son of a neighbor (Keanu Reeves).
Based on a novel written by director Rebecca Miller, “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” is a rambling look at a woman in the midst of “a very quiet nervous breakdown.” The quirky flashback structure shouldn’t work, but Miller teases us, keeping the story fresh by bit by bit doling out tantalizing moments from Pippa’s life. There are ups and downs, and the reckless Pippa often seems to zig when she should zag, but in the end the story is life affirming, but in a grown up way.
Despite the presence of teen dream queen Blake Lively, this isn’t a drama for kids. It’s a study of living life north of forty populated with believable, interesting characters.
Front and center is Robin Wright Penn in the lead role. She’s never made much of an impression on me, despite her great beauty, but here she glows, as if this is the role she has waited all these years to do. As the elder Pippa (Lively plays her as a young woman) Penn hits all the right notes, creating a fully formed person out of a collection of flashbacks and biographical notes.
She is supported by an engaging and able cast including Alan Arkin as her wrinkled husband, Winona Ryder as her teary-eyed friend and (ultimately) betrayer Sandra, Maria Bello as her pill popping Stepford Mom and Keanu Reeves as a love interest with a twist.
“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” mixes and matches mid-life drama and humor, delivering some surprises and real emotional moments to create an interesting portrait of an interesting person.
