“Deep Water,” the new movie from Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, now streaming on Prime Video, is an erotic thriller in name only.
Neither erotic or thrilling, it lacks the smoldering energy of director Adrian Lyne’s previous work. Movies like “9 ½ Weeks” and “Unfaithful” established him as a steamer of screens, but that was then.
This is now. A better title for “Deep Water” may have been “Cold Water.”
Affleck plays Vic, a retired software developer who made a fortune designing a chip that helps drones locate and destroy targets. He spends his days with his daughter while his wild wife Melinda (de Armas), having grown bored of their routine, entertains herself with a series of very public affairs. For the most part Vic bites his lip but when one of Melinda’s flings winds up dead, face down in their pool, cuckold Vic becomes a suspect and their already tenuous situation comes closer to the breaking point.
Lyne, in his first film in twenty years, seems unable to tease out the tension from the love-hate story, sexual or otherwise. The repeated affair/disappearance cycle gets old fast and Lyne does little to make us care about any of them, Vic, Melinda or her unfortunate boyfriends.
I can say that Affleck has one of the best scowls in movies, but that’s not enough to hang an entire performance on. A Sad Affleck meme come to life, for much of the movie it appears he’s given up, Ben, not Vic. It’s as though he stopped caring after the first reel. Vic should display hidden reserves of resolve but Affleck’s performance is as inert as the film.
De Armas, so wonderful in “Knives Out” and “No Time to Die,” is reduced to an eye-batting subject for Lyne’s male gaze.
A tepid psychosexual cuckold tale with a side of murder and loose ends galore, “Deep Water” wastes its stars in a movie that does not rise to the challenge of exploring the story’s themes of morality, murder and marriage.
A powerhouse performer packed into a frail body and even frailer psyche Judy Garland left behind a legacy that is equal parts Hollywood history and cautionary tale. “Judy,” a new film directed by Rupert Goold, examines the declining days of “The Wizard Of Oz” star as she arrives in London to perform a series of concerts.
The year is 1968. Stateside Garland (Renée Zellweger) is at a low ebb. She lives in hotels she can’t afford, is fighting for custody of her children and playing in nightclubs for $150 a show, a fraction of her former superstar salary. She is an unemployable legend. “Unreliable and uninsurable,” she says. “And that’s what the ones who like me say.”
When she’s offered a five-week run at the ritzy Talk of The Town at the Palladium in London, England, she’s reticent. She doesn’t want to be separated from her kids for that long, but she’s broke. She decides to leave her children so that she can make enough money to return and put a roof over their head.
in London she is treated like royalty, packing the club night after night but her insecurities eat at her. “What if I can’t do it again,” she says after her wildly successful opening night. Drink, pills, self-doubt, on-stage meltdowns and a quickie marriage make for an eventful but uneven series of shows. In the press parlance of the time she is often “exhausted and emotional.”
Flashback to young Judy (Darci Shaw) on the MGM backlot set the stage for the tragedy that follows.
“Judy” often veers into sentimentality—the finale clumsily documents the moment when the singer finally got the kind of support she always needed from an audience—but doesn’t shy away from darker aspects of Garland’s life. Bringing the story to vivid life is Zellweger in a career best performance. She looks and sounds enough like Garland to be convincing, but this isn’t just mimicry. The actress digs deep, finding the humour and humanity in a person often regarded as a tragic figure. “I am Judy Garland for an hour a night,” she says. “I want what everybody else wants but I seem to have a harder time getting it.” Zellweger makes us understand how and why Garland spent a lifetime trying to please people who repaid her by always asking for more.
“Judy” is at its strongest when Zellweger is onscreen. Off stage she captures Garland’s complexity; on stage, in numbers like “I’ll Go My Way by Myself” or “The Trolley Song” she is a musical tour de force. The flashbacks, while nicely done, feel like information we already know and don’t add much to the overall movie. We learn just as much about Garland’s psychological unrest from Zellweger nuanced performance as we do from the broadly written flashbacks. This is, after all, a character study, not a history lesson.
“The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” a captivating new drama starring Jimmie Fails and Jonathan Majors, wonders aloud if Thomas Wolfe was right when he wrote, “You can’t go home again.”
Jimmie Fails (Fails) has a dream. He wants to live in the ornate Victorian house with red and gold trim his grandfather built after WWII in San Fran’s in Filmore district. His father (Rob Morgan) lost the house when Jimmie was just a child and now the home’s contents are stored in a relative’s basement. When he isn’t working at the old folk’s home he spends time at the house, even though another older couple own it. Uninvited and much to the consternation of the residents, he does odd jobs like yard work and painting the windowsills. “This house,” he says. “This is what I do.”
When the old couple moves, leaving the home empty, Jimmie moves in. After an unsuccessful attempt to buy the place from a realtor (Finn Wittrock) who needs 20% down on the $4 million price he claims squatter’s rights and has the bills put in his name. His friend, budding playwright Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), moves in with him and they attempt to recreate the home as Jimmie remembers it from his youth.
“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is about many things. Nostalgia. Love of friends and city. It’s about how gentrification in San Francisco has marginalized people of colour creating housing inequality. Mostly, though, it’s about the bittersweet romanticizing of the past with a healthy dose of reality. Perhaps Wolfe was right, but simply because the home in question is four walls and a roof, not a panacea to Jimmie’s feelings of emotional displacement. Jimmie’s expectations linked to the idea of home, in this his case feelings of family unity, are likely never to be met. It’s melancholic and beautifully rendered in a film that feels like a tone poem of love and loss.
Theses days the word landline conjures up a specific retro feel. It harkens back to a time before everyone played Candy Crush on their mobile devices and when pay phones dotted the landscape. That’s the world where the new Jenny Slate dramedy “Landline” takes place.
It’s New York City, 1995. Dana Jacobs (Slate) is a layout artist at Paper Magazine when she isn’t at Blockbuster with her fiancée Ben (Jay Duplass) agonizing over what movie to rent. Younger sister Ali (Abby Quinn) is as free-spirited as her sibling is buttoned down.
“You’re like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe,” Dana says to Ali. “You are the embodiment of constipation,” Ali snaps back.
Despite their differences the sisters bond when Ali discovers erotic poetry her father Alan (John Turturro) wrote for a woman who is not his wife Pat (Edie Falco). Their disgust for his actions brings them together, despite the fact that Dana has thrown off the shackles of engagement and embarked on a secret journey of self-discovery with Nate (Finn Wittrock). “I am flailing,” she says. “Trying to figure out if the life I have picked for myself is the one that I want.” “We are a family of cheaters!” Ali exclaims.
“Landline” uses infidelity as a backdrop for a study of partnership and family. Everyone’s relationship is teetering on the edge and yet this is a hopeful movie, a film that suggests monogamy is viable when given room to breathe.
“Obvious Child” director Gillian Robespierre brings a strong ensemble together, elevating the material with strong performances. Duplass is suitably milquetoast as Ben, the dull but lovable fiancée. Turturro and Falco breathe life into characters that in lesser hands might have been caricatures or worse, simply a plot device to support the sisters’ story.
The stars here, however, are Slate and Quinn. They look like sisters but their chemistry extends beyond the skin deep. Slate’s giggles and affectionate asides—“You’re a weird little bird.”—feel authentic, as though these two have a long shared history that predates anything we see on the screen. They bring humanity and sympathy to the film despite their foibles.
“Landline” is an engaging portrait of broken relationships in an analogue time. It’s a gently heart tugging story about the consequences of breaking relationship rules. There are jokes and there are tears but mainly “Landline” has a wistful tone that gets under your skin.
“The Big Short” is an infuriating movie. Not because it’s poorly made but because it is so well made. It takes years of banking bafflegab and distils it down to the essence in what may be the funniest, smartest and most maddening look at why America’s housing market crashed in 2008.
The films opens with a famous Mark Twain quote, “I’t ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The quote is a bit of a Mobius strip but so is the story “The Big Short” is trying to tell.
Based on Michael Lewis‘ nonfiction best-seller of the same name, the film presents a cavalcade of facts and information formed into a story about how four investment-bankers—played by Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Finn Wittrock, John Magaro—saw the financial meltdown coming when no one else did. Taking on the arrogance of Wall Street’s old boy network, they bet against the American economy and, in the process, expose an unprecedented level of financial criminality.
“The Big Short” is a lighthearted look at a dire situation. Call it a dramedy. Director Adam McKay is best known for making movies like “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” “The Other Guys,” “Step Brothers,” so he knows how to milk a laugh out of a scene. He also knows that the level of understanding the viewer needs to get why the housing bubble burst is above the level of most MBAs.
The movie explains that Wall Street likes to use confusing terms to make you think only they can understand what they do. “It’s like 2+2 = fish,” says one banker, expressing disbelief at the financial manipulations used by the big banks. To make the financial mumbo-jumbo sexy the McKay uses a variety of tricks, including cutting to Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining subprime loans in plain language. It’s a spoonful of sugar to help the expositional medicine go down. From the simple—one loan officer calls his clients “Ninjas, no income, no job.”—to the incredibly complex world of CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) “The Big Short” doesn’t shy away from tackling complex financial transactions but it never feels dry or forced. McKay is a showman, and layers the film with fourth-wall-breaking celebrity cameos and concise social commentary woven into the drama.
A great scene of Goldman Sachs executives laughing at Dr. Michael Burry’s (Christian Bale) $100 million investment is cut into a rap video celebrating excess. In one wordless scene McKay illustrates the arrogance of the bankers in the days before the rug was pulled out from underneath them.
Subtle it’s not, but the director’s use of pop culture images and music to set the scene goes a long way to establish a time, place and tone.
“The Big Short” features strong performances—Bale stretches in ways we haven’t seen from him before—but it is the film’s unflinching depiction of unbridled greed that will resonate.
Adam McKay is best known for directing broad comedies with Will Ferrell like Anchorman and Step Brothers. But his new film, The Big Short, is a different beast.
It’s the story of how four investment-bankers — played by Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Finn Wittrock and John Magaro — saw the devastating financial meltdown of 2007–10 coming when no one else did. It’s a lighthearted look at a dire situation. Call it a dramedy.
“When I read this book it did everything I wanted to see in a movie,” he says. “It was funny, it was tragic, and the characters were amazing. I think it was a case of running into one of the great books of the last 20 years that shows what is really going on in our modern world.”
McKay knows how to milk a laugh out of a scene but he also knows that the level of understanding the viewer needs to get why the housing bubble burst is above the level of most MBAs.
“It’s like 2 + 2 = fish,” says one banker, expressing disbelief at the financial manipulations used by the big banks. In the film he takes pains to explain how Wall Street likes to use confusing terms to make you think only they can understand what they do.
“We wanted to be the first Wall Street movie that took you behind the curtain, that really said, All these confusing terms you hear, all the ways the banks make you feel stupid or bored … it’s actually not that hard. If the guy who did Step Brothers can understand it you can too.
“We were trying to show that this thing that half of Wall Street doesn’t understand, these derivatives, mortgage backed securities, they’re actually pretty easy. They bundled a bunch of mortgages, they sold them, made a ton of money. Then they ran out of good mortgages so they put crappy mortgages in and coerced the ratings agencies to give them AAA. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
McKay has an a-list cast but he didn’t want to make the movie all about the stars.
“It would have been very easy to just do this character story and just show these guys being affected by it but I wanted this thing to bridge a gap. I think there is too much stuff in our society where people just think, ‘Ahhh banking! It’s boring. Politics! Who cares?’ The truth is, this stuff is exciting, It’s the language of power. Once you get hooked on it, it gets addictive.”
The Big Short is a look at our recent past, but McKay warns this is not a historical drama or cautionary tale, rather it’s very much a going concern.
“All the effects of this collapse are still completely in play. All the same questions are still in play and they fixed a few things but they didn’t fix the main, weight bearing beam beams that caused this problem. So this is an active story right this second. That is one of the main reasons we made this movie, we want people to understand that. This isn’t over.”
