I usually avoid movies with titles that rhyme. For every “Be Kind Rewind” or “Chop Shop,” which I liked, there’s a “From Prada to Nada” or “Good Luck Chuck” that remind me that some of the time, a rhyme equals grime.
OK, that was lame, but you get the idea.
Cutesy titles are often the first warning sign of what is to follow. A new film, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” commits the name game sin, but Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville brings the poetry to the movie.
Set in 1957, Manville plays Ada Harris, an optimistic London house cleaner. “Today’s my lucky day,” she says. A self-described “invisible woman,” she is also a dreamer, a person who hangs on to the belief that her husband Eddie will finally come home from war, and that something better is always around the corner.
Only one of those things is true.
When Eddie is officially declared killed in action, she is devastated, but stoic. “I should have known he would have gotten back to me if he could have,” she said, holding back tears. “Well, footloose and fancy free.”
When she sees a beautiful Dior haute couture gown belonging to one of her aristocratic customers, it is an epiphany. Although the dress costs double what she makes a year, she makes it her goal to visit Paris’s 30 Avenue Montaigne, Christian Dior’s namesake boutique, and treat herself to a dress.
Through a series of unlikely happenstances, Mrs. Harris raises enough money to get to the City of Lights, pay cash for the dress and fulfil her dream, but how will she, as the snobby Dior house manager Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) asks, “give the dress the life it deserves.”
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is the kind of feel good-movie that seems as though it was written by an algorithm. Of course, it’s based on the 1958 novel “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” by Paul Gallico, which later a became TV movie of the same name starring Angela Lansbury, Diana Rigg, and Omar Sharif, but it feels as though a bot was asked, “What makes people feel all cuddly- cushy?”
How about some old school British slang, some romance, the Eiffel Tower, glittering dresses, some class warfare and even a tad of existentialism? Nothing like a movie about aspirations with a side of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The philosopher’s name is used as a prop to illustrate the intellectual prowess of the French love interests (Alba Baptista and Lucas Bravo) but Mrs. Harris appears to take Sartre’s ideas to heart.
When Sartre said, “Life begins on the other side of despair,” he may have been talking about Mrs. Harris’s rebirth after she learned Eddie wasn’t coming back to her. Sartre’s observation, “We are our choices,” applies to the title character’s indomitable spirit and her decision to find the beauty in her world, no matter how frivolous. While the movie reduces the existentialist’s theories to pop psychology, the uplift in Manville’s winning performance provides an escape to a more glamorous time (even if it takes place in Paris during a garbage strike).
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is predictable and overlong, but Manville brings the heart and soul.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Lois Lee to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the virtual reality of “The Martrix Resurrection,” the coming of age dramedy “Licorice Pizza” and Denzel Washington in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and the jukebox musical “Sing 2.”
These days movies are regularly remade, rebooted, reimagined and regurgitated. But none of those terms capture how Warner Bros has brought back one of their most famous and ground breaking franchises.
The new Keanu Reeves movie isn’t simply a return to the Matrix, the simulated reality created by intelligent machines to pacify humans and steal their energy, it’s a resurrection. After eighteen years, Neo has been raised from the dead by Lana Wachowski in “The Matrix: Resurrections,” now playing in theatres.
The last time we saw Neo (Reeves) he made the ultimate sacrifice, giving himself to create peace between machines and mankind. His death would allow people to finally be free of the virtual world of the Matrix.
In “Resurrections” it’s twenty years later. Neo now goes by his real name, Thomas A. Anderson. He is the “greatest videogame designer of his generation,” with an ordinary life, save for the visions that plague him. “I’ve had dreams,” he says, “that weren’t just dreams.” His analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) has him on a steady diet of heavy therapy and blue pills, meant to quell the strange delusions.
Anderson’s regular life is turned upside down when his business partner Smith (Jonathan Groff) announces that their company will be making a sequel to their most popular game, “The Matrix.” As his team works on the new game—“It’s a mindbomb!”—his memories become more intense and soon he has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction.
Or is it all real?
When people from his past, like computer programmer and hacker Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an alternate reality version of the heroic Matrix hovercraft captain who first believed Neo was “The One,” appear, Thomas fears he is losing his mind.
Things become clearer—Or do they?—when the new Morpheus offers Thomas/Neo a choice of pills. The blue ones will keep Thomas’ state of mind status quo. The red ones, however, will take him down the rabbit hole, into the heart of the Matrix. “Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia,” says Morpheus.
Pill popped, the simulated world opens up to reveal a dangerous place in need of a hero. Teaming with a group of rebels, Neo battles a new enemy and secrets are revealed. “The Matrix is the same or worse,” says Neo, “and I’m back where I started. It feels like none of it mattered.”
“The Matrix: Resurrections” may be the most self-aware movie of the year. No instalment of “The Matrix” will ever match the whiz bang excitement of the first film, and “Resurrections” knows it. It comments on itself and consistently winks at its legacy.
“This cannot be a retread, reboot or regurgitation,” says one of the “Matrix” videogame designers.
“Why not?” says another. “Reboots sell.”
Like the movie’s story, the film itself attempts to blur the line between the reality of the story and the very act of watching the movie. It is simultaneously self-depreciating and cynical. It’s OK to have a bit of good fun with the story, especially given the oh-so-serious tone of the previous “Matrix” movies, but by the time Thomas meets Trinity at the Simulatte Café, the jokes have worn thin.
The meat of the story, a search for truth, is the engine that keeps the movie motoring along, but the endless exposition, a torrent of words, seems to be the fuel that keeps things running. When a character says, “That’s the thing about stories, they never end,” it’s hard to disagree as the movie gets mired in mythology and world building.
It becomes a slog, without enough of the trademarked Wachowski action scenes to help pick up the pace. When the movie does dip into bullet time and the action that made the original so memorable, it feels like a pale comparison. There is nothing much new—“I still know Kung Fu,” says Neo—just frenetic action and nostalgia for a time when a slow-motion bullet made our eyeballs dance.
“The Matrix: Resurrections” does try to recontextualize the existing mythology. This time around the all-you-need-is-love-story between Neo and Trinity is amped up and there is some timely social commentary about control, whether it’s from the government or a virtual reality machine, but, and there is a big “but,” as much as I wanted to enjoy another trip to the Matrix, I found it too meta, too long and yet, not ambitious enough.
