“La La Land” reinvents the traditional big screen musical by playing it straight. The original songs and new story feel like something Gene Kelly would approve of but not quite recognize as the form he helped perfect in Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Aspiring actress and barista Mia (Emma Stone) and serious jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) can’t help but meet cute. He honks his horn at her during a traffic jam. She flips him off. They meet again in a restaurant. She’s about to compliment him, he’s rude to her. Worse yet they bump into one another at a pool party where he’s playing with a 80s cover band, playing a-ha covers for be-bopping drunks. Third time is a charm and they finally connect, for real. Flirting, dancing and singing they build a relationship as they construct careers in modern day Los Angeles.
The real and the unreal collide in a film that values naturalism in an unnatural genre. Mia and Sebastian burst into song, dance on city streets but do so in the most unaffected of ways. It looks and feels like an old-school musical—the camera dances around the actors and it’s always magic hour—but Stone and Gosling are very contemporary in their approach to the material. Woven into the romantic, joyful script are real comments on the setting—“That’s LA, they worship everything,” says Sebastian, “but value nothing.”—a sense of the pleasure and pain that accompany passion, whether its for a person or a career and melancholy when things don’t quite work out. It’s a movie that dances to it’s own beat. By times bright and garish or atmospheric and moody, it’s never less than entertaining.
Gosling is a charming leading man and equal match for Stone whose remarkable face and expressive performance give the movie much of its heart. Director Damien Chazelle is clearly smitten with his leading lady, allowing his camera to caress her face in long, uninterrupted close-ups.
From a trickily edited opening song-and-dance number in a traffic jam to a spectacular dance among the stars to heartfelt human feelings, “La La Land” doesn’t just breathe new life into an old genre it performs CPR on it, bringing its beating heart back to vibrant life.
In “Poltergeist,” the new reworking of the 1982 ghost-in-the-TV Tobe Hooper cult classic chiller, when Mom (Rosemarie DeWitt), “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” you know, of course, here’s loads to be afraid of… like crappy special effects and a story almost entirely devoid of thrills or chills.
Sam Rockwell and DeWitt are Eric and Amy, underemployed parents of three, Maddy (Kennedi Clements), Griffin (Kyle Catlett) and Kendra (Saxon Sharbino). Forced to downsize, the young family relocates to a rundown and apparently haunted home in suburban Illinois. The older kids aren’t thrilled with their new home but little Maddy loves it, immediately talking to the invisible spirits that also live there.
On their first full night in the place Maddy modernizes the most famous visual from the original film by sitting in front of the flashing big screen television. “They’re here,” she says and soon things get poltergeisty. Clown dolls attack the kids and Maddy disappears but is able to communicate with them through the television. And people say there’s nothing worth watch on TV now that “Mad Men” has gone off the air.
They discover the house was built on top of an old cemetery but are told the bodies were “moved to a nicer neighbourhood.” Freaked out, Eric and Amy call in experts, Dr. Claire Powell (Jane Adams) from the local university’s Department of Paranormal Research and reality show ghostbuster Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris) to rid themselves of the pesky poltergeist and rescue Maddy from the 500 channel universe.
“Poltergeist” would more accurately have been called “Paychequegeist: Good Actors, Terrible Movie.” I hope whatever money Rockwell, DeWitt and Harris were paid for this was worth it because cash must have been the only incentive to sign on for this movie. It certainly wasn’t the script and this one is likely going to come back to haunt them
Where to start? How about Rockwell’s reaction to Maddy’s disappearance? “If we call the cops they’ll blame us,” he says, opting instead to bring in a ghostbuster to locate his youngest daughter. Or how about DeWitt’s sly smile after overhearing a lover’s tiff between Powell and Burke? Her daughter is being tormented by malicious spirits who aim to drag her to hell but, hey, laughter is the best medicine, right? Yes, it’s laughable, but for us, not her.
There is so much wrong with “Poltergeist” it’s hard to know where to begin. Sure little Kennedi Clements could probably win an award for Best Scared Face of the Year but she’s more scared than anyone in the audience for this generic reboot will ever be.
Anne Hathaway is getting a lot of notice for her raw edged work in Rachel Getting Married, and rightfully so. The young actress best known as the goody-two-shoes star of The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted has, in recent years, been making moves to distance herself from the young adult mainstream with a provocative role in Brokeback Mountain and a high profile turn in The Devil Wears Prada. In Rachel Gettting Married she hands in tour-de-force work that marks her first completely adult performance.
Shot cinéma vérité style on a combination of grainy, handheld 35 mm and consumer video cameras the movie begins with recovering addict Kym (Hathaway) leaving rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Old wounds are reopened as family Kym tries to readjust to life with an overbearing father (Bill Irwin), absent mother (Debra Winger) and her sister’s upcoming “happy day.”
Director Jonathan Demme has spent most of the last ten years making documentaries and it shows in every frame of Rachel Getting Married. It feels like a doc, from the jiggly camera work to the raw, Dogme style of emotional intensity. The film was shot without rehearsal and it shows, in a good way. Scenes are frequently shot in long, uninterrupted Robert Altman-esque takes and the actor’s reactions often feel spontaneous and that feeling of naturalness deepens the believability of the story. It feels intimate, free-wheeling and unpredictable.
At the center of it all is Hathaway, who, surrounded by a cast comprised of old pros like Debra Winger and Bill Irwin and newcomers like TV On the Radio singer turned actor Tunde Adebimpe, is the emotional core of the film. Her greatest feat here is to play an unlikable, self-centered person and still have the audience feel sympathy for her. It’s an intense, unvarnished performance that reveals the pain that lurks beneath Kym’s goth-like exterior. She’s tough and fragile; someone who is able to live with her past sins, but can’t get over them. It’s an award caliber performance that she has hinted at before but never delivered.
Also very good and award worthy is Debra Winger as Kym’s detached mother Abby. Winger works infrequently, she’s only made four films since Y2K, but her work as the damaged Abby, a woman who cannot come to grips with the wellspring of emotion that exists inside her, is spectacular.
Rachel Getting Married isn’t a perfect movie. It is a rambling film with that suffers from self indulgence from Demme, who pushes the audience’s tolerance for wedding music—no matter how eclectic—to new extremes but its great performances and tough emotional truths more than make up for unnecessary excesses.
“Your Sister’s Sister” contains the most modest sex scene of the year. It’s the kind of scene where great care is taken to pull blankets up to the neck and whatever glimpses of unblanketed human form is on display are shrouded in a t-shirt. It’s a sequence that sums up the entire movie—modest and not nearly as revealing as it should be.
Actor – director Lynn Shelton has created a three-hander to examine the fraught relationship between a trio of people, sisters Iris and Hannah (Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt) and Jack (Mark Duplass) the brother of Iris’s late ex-boyfriend. The odd bunch find themselves at a remote family cottage, examining their relationships after a night of drunken fun goes too far.
A mix of improvisation and scripted dialogue, “Your Sister’s Sister” is a nicely performed piece that feels like a nicely performed piece and little more. Characters talk about themselves and their relationships but their development feels stagey and often contrived. It’s a case of good actors saddled with too much dialogue and bad editing. Scenes go on longer than they should, and by the time we get to the rom-com-esque ending the movie has a hard time justifying its ninety-minute running time.
“La La Land” reinvents the traditional big screen musical by playing it straight. The original songs and new story feel like something Gene Kelly would approve of but not quite recognize as the form he helped perfect in Hollywood’s Golden Age.
