I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about the Lucy Liu heartbreaker “Rosemead,” the historical drama “The Choral” and the family dynamics of “Father Mother Sister Brother” and the feelgood divorce movie “Is This Thing On?”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the Lucy Liu heartbreaker “Rosemead,” the historical drama “The Choral” and the family dynamics of “Father Mother Sister Brother.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “Father Mother Sister Brother,” a new anthology film directed by Jim Jarmusch starring Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett, and now playing in theatres, is a tryptic of stories about awkward family relationships in the United States, Ireland and France.
CAST: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Sarah Greene, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat. Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch.
REVIEW: Three stories united by the theme of family dynamics, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is a quiet, well-observed portmanteau centered around the mysterious nature of the connection between parent and child and family secrets.
In the film’s opening segment, “Father,” siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) travel to the rural Northeast U.S. to visit their estranged father (Tom Waits). Concerned about his finances since the death of their mother, Jeff brings along an expensive box of groceries, but unanswered questions arise when Emily notices her father is wearing an expensive Rolex watch. “You’ve always been my favorite son,” father says to Jeff. “Well, I’m you’re only son.”
In “Mother,” the film’s second story, sisters Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and Timothea (Cate Blanchett) make their annual pilgrimage to spend an afternoon with their secretive novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling). An undercurrent of tension silently hangs over their visit as the sisters compete for their mother’s attention as many secrets are left unsaid. “I’m very happy to see you on one hand,” says mother, “ but I have to keep you from stirring things up.”
The movie wraps with the Paris-set “Sister Brother.” Adult twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) confront the fragility of life when they return to their parent’s apartment in the aftermath of a family tragedy. “Each moment is each moment,” says Billy.
Quiet, melancholy and tinged with a bittersweet quality, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is a film where the things left unsaid are as important as the things the characters say.
It isn’t conventional drama. Conflicts exist but are put on simmer as writer and director Jim Jarmusch leaves space around the characters and situations, so the stories breathe. It allows the audience to be present, to catch the nuances of the terrific performances from Driver, Waits, Blanchett, and Rampling. The subtle slights, the gentle comedy and embrace of the mundane are seemingly unassuming but sharpened to a fine point in the hands of these actors who understand the exceptional ordinariness of the film’s situations.
What “Father Mother Sister Brother” lacks in fireworks, it makes up for in introspection. It may be too slow for viewers expecting family drama writ large, but the various awkward interactions on display will certainly ring bells for many theatre goers.
“Licorice Pizza,” the new slice-of-life drama from director Paul Thomas Anderson, and now playing in theatres, is a very specific movie. It transports us back in time to Los Angeles circa the 1970s. Nixon is president. In Hollywood the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant is the place to see and be seen and gas stations face country wide fuel shortages. But against that specific backdrop comes a story ripe with freewheeling charm, nostalgia and universal themes.
Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, is Gary Valentine, a cocky fifteen-year-old actor with a blossoming career and a back pocket filled with get rich quick schemes. At picture day at his high school he spots photographer’s assistant Alana (Alana Haim). She is ten years older than him, but he’s feeling lucky and asks her out on a date. She agrees, but says it isn’t a date, just dinner. He takes her to hotspot Tail o’ the Cock and at the end of the night tells her, “I’m not going to forget you. Just like you’re not going to forget me.”
It is the beginning of a mostly platonic relationship that sees them drift in and out of one another’s lives, start a water bed business and navigate maturity. “Maybe fate brought us together,” Gary says to her. “Our roads brought us here.”
“Licorice Pizza” (the name refers to a defunct Californian record store chain) isn’t a movie overly concerned with plot. Instead, it relies on the characters to keep things interesting.
Newcomers Hoffman and Haim, (she plays guitars and keyboards in the pop rock band Haim), do just that. Each are magnetic performers on their own, she is all glowering intensity, he’s got teenage swagger down to a tee—“I’m a showman,” he says, “it’s what I’m meant to do.”—but put them together and sparks fly. From their first exchange in the high school gym to the film’s closing moments they win us over. In the movie the characters experience the first blush of friendship and love. In the audience we get to experience another first, the debut of two new, very promising actors.
Later, after the film, I found myself daydreaming that perhaps we could revisit them every ten years or so à la the relationship trilogy “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.”
Some old-timers get to strut their stuff as well. Sean Penn plays a riff on hard drinking actor William Holden with equal parts smarm and charm and Bradley Cooper pulls out all the stops to bring Hollywood hairdresser-turned-movie mogul Jon Peters to vivid, excessive life.
It is an evocative rendering of a specific time and place, but it doesn’t all sit right. In his recreation of the 1970s, director Paul Thomas Anderson includes two scenes featuring John Michael Higgins as Jerry Frick, owner of the San Fernando Valley’s first Japanese restaurant, The Mikado. In his two scenes he is seen speaking with an over-the-top, buffoonish Japanese accent in conversation with his Japanese wives, played by Yumi Mizui and Megumi Anjo. Both scenes stick out like sore thumbs. I imagine that they are meant to represent the causal racism of the time but they break the movie’s magical spell with cultural insensitivity that adds nothing, save for a cheap laugh, to the story.
“Licorice Pizza” is kind of flipping through a diary. Some details are intense, some glossed over, but everything is relevant to the experience being written about. Like diary entries, the movie is episodic. Each passing episode allows us to get to know Gary and Alana a bit better, and just as importantly, remind us what it means to be young and in love.
Low key and amiable, “The Old Man and the Gun” is a crime drama about the nicest bank robber ever. Robert Redford, age 82, plays a stick-up man whose victims gush about how polite and well-mannered he was as he relieved them of their cash.
Forest Tucker (Redford), career criminal and all round nice guy, is part of a gang the press would later name the Over-The-Hill-Gang. All north of seventy the thieves (Danny Glover and Tom Waits) rob rural banks, usually making off with hundreds, not thousands of dollars. Calm and collected, they get in and out quickly. “Don’t do anything stupid,” Tucker says to the tellers. “I wouldn’t want to have to hurt you ‘cuz I like you. Don’t break my heart.” For Tucker it’s not about the cash, it’s about the rush.
Driving the get-a-way car after one bank job Tucker stops to assist a stranded motorist. As the police whiz by he gives Jewel (Sissy Spacek) a line of chat that charms her enough to agree to go for a cup of coffee. The pair hit it off and begin a friendship that borders on the romantic.
Meanwhile Tucker and crew are robbing banks, sometimes more than one a day, a streak that draws the attention of detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) and the FBI.
The mostly true story of Tucker and his life of crime and passion is a low-key affair anchored by the easy charms of Redford and Spacek.
Redford made a career playing rascally anti-heroes like the leads in “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Here there is a wistfulness in the character that comes with age and the realization that the end of the road is just around the bend.
Spacek plays Jewel as a woman of strength; a person who has seen it all but is still open to finding something new. Together the pair bring life experiences that create a lived-in chemistry that is never less than watchable.
Add to that a scene-stealing performance from Tom Waits—every line of his dialogue sounds like a line from one of his songs—and you have a new take on an American staple, the charismatic scoundrel.
There have been many movies about writer’s block. Screenwriters love to write about the affliction that affects everyone who puts fingers to keyboard for a living. So Martin McDonagh, the writer director of “Seven Psychopaths,” isn’t treading new ground here, but he does it entertainingly and with way more guns than you usually find in movies about writers.
Colin Farrell is Marty, an alcoholic screenwriter whose mental state hovers somewhere between depression and suicide. Blocked, he can’t seem to get past the title of his latest screenplay, “Seven Psychopaths.” Trying to pull him out of his funk, his (not always) helpful friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) places an ad in the newspaper asking for certified psychopaths to contact Marty. In exchange for their stories, he might make them famous in the movie. Meantime Billy is working a side job with Hans (Christopher Walken), stealing dogs only to “rescue” them for the reward money. The scheme puts all of them in contact with Charlie (Woody Harrelson), a sensitive psychopath who cries at the thought of his lost dog, but doesn’t mind killing people to get it returned.
As you might imagine from a movie titled “Seven Psychopaths,” there is a great deal of antisocial behavior on display. It’s occasionally gruesome—heads are detached from their bodies, throats are cut—but it is the performance style that you’ll notice. Rockwell has rarely been this twitchy, but it mostly works, and Farrell and Harrelson bring considerable charisma to their roles, but it is Walken who is memorable.
Everybody loves Walken, and there’s no denying he fills the screen, but his idiosyncratic vocal mannerisms are so exaggerated here it’s almost as if you are watching someone do an impression of the actor, rather than the real thing. He’s entertaining, but his performance here is just inches away from self-parody.
In a way that’s appropriate for a film that is so inward looking. McDonagh has taken all the bits and pieces of thriller and turned them on their heads. Early on Marty says he doesn’t want his screenplay to be “about guys with guns in their hands,” sending an indication that the film-idea-within-the-film may be telegraphing the action (or lack thereof) that we’re about to see.
The film subverts its own story to make ironic comments on the collaborative nature of filmmaking when not all the creative agree on the story’s direction, plot structure and role of women in action movies, (“You can’t let the animals die in movies, just the women.”). It almost works except that the cleverness of the idea—making an anti-movie—feels a bit labored in the final third of the film.
“Seven Psychopaths” gets lost in its own idea, but only temporarily. What’s left is solid fun.
