Sisters was the last film I saw in a theater in 2015. It’s the latest film from the team of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and it’s the funniest I saw last year.

Maura is divorced and is a Nurse. She’s on her own, and she bends over backwards to help everyone but herself. Kate is staying with her daughter Haley (Madison Davenport) in the home of a former employer. Kate can’t hold a job for long, always living on the edge of instability.

Maura has the good relationship with their parents, Bucky and Deana Ellis (James Brolin and Dianne Weist). They tell her that it’s time to move on, so they’ve chosen to sell the family home and move to an Adult Community. They ask her to tell Kate of their plans, but she doesn’t until Kate comes home for a visit.  That’s when it slips out that the parents are selling. It’s a total shock to Kate, who is broke and was going to ask to move back home to live there with her daughter. However, Bucky and Deana have already moved out, so they tell the kids to grab what they can and leave the rest.

Kate is livid, but Maura talks her down. Kate insists that they have One Final Party before the sale. As the two of them reconnect, they meet the new buyers, a condescending couple who want to change everything about the home and property. That pushes Maura over the edge, and she agrees to have that one final blowout. The two Ellis sisters are back, baby, and they’re gonna make it a night to remember.

They prep for the party, inviting everyone still in the area, even the annoying ones. All are invited, except for that one Mean Girl that’s Kate’s mortal enemy, Brinda (Maya Rudolph). They end up telling her she’s not invited.  Kate gets Maura to invite the new neighbor, James (Ike Barinholtz), to come, and Maura does it, if only to get Kate to be the responsible one this time. Growing up, it was always Maura.

As you’d expect, the party starts off dull, until the music arrives and people start dancing. Their friend Dave (John Leguizamo) also invited Pazuzu (John Cena) to supply the party with recreational pharmaceuticals. He’s a stone-faced straight man, and Kate tries to get him to crack.

As with all the other Party-themed movies (Bachelor Party, House Party I & II and so on), it gets crazier and crazier, worse, and worse. I bet you know the sort of thing that happens next. What I especially appreciated was the epilogue. Most of the films of this type would have ended The Morning After, but Sisters “finishes” the story.

Even though it’s the sort of movie you’ve seen before, there were some additional spins on the same old tropes that actually improved it. The casting is good – there are several of the current cast of Saturday Night Live in the movie. Given their previous movie history together, I’d have expected the role of Maura to have gone to Tina and Kate to Amy, but they switched it around, this time. However, in this story, Kate becomes the responsible one to host the party, so it sort of balances out, if you follow. The other strange bit of casting is with Dianne Weist and James Brolin. They play well together, but what’s strange is that the two of them also star in the new CBS sitcom Life in Pieces as husband and wife. I guess they decided that after making this movie, they work well enough together that they appear as a package in the sitcom I’m presuming that the movie was made before the sitcom was cast. Go figure.

If you hadn’t guessed, I really liked this film, and I do recommend it.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the first Disney-produced Star Wars movie, helmed by JJ Abrams. This film is a return to the original themes of the original Star Wars trilogy, done in the same style. I really enjoyed this film, and rank it on the same level as those films. I’ve seen it twice already, and will probably see it again. I haven’t seen it in 3D, nor do I intend to, since it does not appear to benefit from it – others have told me as much.

There are minor spoilers in this review, so stop reading now if you feel the need to avoid them

 
Continue reading Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) →

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a documentary about an special interview that took place about 50 years ago. In the 1960s, Francois Truffaut had been a movie critic for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma, which was known for its harsh criticism of the movies of the day. He’d become a director, himself, with the movie 400 Blows. He approached Alfred Hitchcock, and scheduled an in-depth interview that lasted for days. Truffaut arranged for the event to be recorded and photographed. In 1967, Truffaut published his summary of the interview in book form, titled “Hitchcock/Truffaut”. The book has become one of the must-reads for anyone wanting to be serious about making movies. Even now, it has a high price on Amazon.com

Here is a link to the documentary trailer.

This documentary contains excerpts of the interview, in more or less chronological order. You get to understand Hitchcock and his thought processes, but not all of them. Truffaut walked Hitchcock through his film history, and discussed each in detail, most of which is in the book. However, this film is only partially about that. It also has interviews with numerous other directors, each of whom have had a personal connection to the book. These include Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Peter Bodgonovitch, and many others. What we get from them is their reaction to reading the book, and how it affected their own films, and lives, for that matter.

What it doesn’t cover, and I suspect it wasn’t even part of the interview, was Hitchcock’s well-known horrible treatment of his leading ladies. Several films were made around that very subject. Given that the interview took place when it did, one could begin to see why it wasn’t discussed – it wasn’t well known back then. I would have loved to have had some insight what he was thinking at the time, but we’ll never know.

This is a very fascinating film, especially for anyone who loves movies and moviemaking. Recommended.

Rwanda and Juliet was one of the last films was one of the last films shown in the fall 2015 schedule of the Arthouse Film Festival. It’s a documentary, which follows an American college professor, Andrew Garrod, who’s decided to being Shakespeare to Rwanda. In 1994, there was a genocide, where the Hutu families caused a million deaths of the Tutsi citizens.

The trailer for the movie can be found here.

Twenty years have passed since that tragedy, and Garrod hopes to use Romeo and Juliet as a way to aid in the healing of old wounds. Given the nature of the story, where two people fall in love from warring families of Montagues and Capulets, he felt it was an appropriate choice. His idea was to cast only Hutus for one family and Tutsis for the other. Once he arrives and schedules the auditions, that all gets thrown out the window. The auditioners are very undisciplined, and casting is somewhat difficult. He cannot align his choices along those lines. It ends up being a mix.

Once cast, there’s a lot of work to do. Most of the cast has either little or no stage experience, and there’s a lot to accomplish. Garrod only has funding for about 6 weeks of producing the play, so it’s make or break. Many of the cast are wary of the Professor, and believe his plan to be a bit ridiculous, claiming that reconciliation has occurred, so a play to reunite the people is no longer necessary. They get frustrated, but pull together when it’s needed.

The documentarians end up following several of the cast, and find out more than they ever thought they would. I’ll just leave it at that.

Overall, I would side with the Rwandans in this attempt by an outsider to think that Professor Garrod’s efforts would have as big an impact as he expected. I won’t go further down that thinking, so that you may discover it for yourselves. This is an acceptable documentary and worth the time to watch.

The Arthouse Film Festival screened The Club (or “El Club” as its Chilean Title is) recently. The film is presented in its original Spanish, but with English subtitles. The movie revolves around a difficult subject.

In the small ocean town of Boca, Chile, there is a group of aging men. One of them has a trained Greyhound dog, who races it for cash on the side. We come to find that the men are ‘retired’ Catholic priests, but not by their direct admission. One day, another priest is brought to them, to stay in seclusion. A nun oversees the men, and is their caregiver. She instructs the newcomer that he’s welcome, and while they other priests introduce themselves, a homeless guy wanders up and makes it known he knows who the newcomer is. The man is drunkenly shouting that the new priest abused him as a child, and goes in graphic detail. The other priests are annoyed, and hands the newcomer a gun, telling him to fire some warning shots to scare him off. The mortified priest walks out, and instead of scaring the guy off, he shoots himself in the head. The look on his face confirms that he did all the things the man is shouting.

The Church sends an investigator, another priest, and he’s doing more than investigating the situation. It’s likely he’s come to evaluate the effectiveness of the group home, and starts making changes. It seems that all the men were sent there, for various reasons, not because of their ages, but more due to crimes committed. None of them will admit they did anything wrong and stonewall the investigator.

The homeless man, however, is not satisfied with the outcome. He stays in town, getting odd jobs where he can. He wants to confront the other priests, too, and repeats what was done to him. The subject matter of this movie is extremely unpleasant in and of itself.

The priests are trying to ignore their pasts, but cannot avoid their true nature. These men don’t want to attract any special attention, so they devise a plan to get rid of him. They will do anything to prevent the truth from coming out, and enact a plan to eliminate their problems. The horrific plan is discussed, and acted out, but the film cuts away before being “too graphic”. They try to pin the blame for what they have done on the man, wanting the townspeople to kill him, but it backfires. The fact is that these men have become old and bitter, and deny they ever did anything immoral or untoward. Their actions prove otherwise, showing that they are heartless and unrepentant, and will do anything to save their own asses.

I did not like this movie one bit. It was well constructed, but that’s all it has. It’s clear that whoever made this movie has an axe to grind about Catholic priests and their abuses of power, but this movie’s conclusion was weak. They deserve a worse outcome than what the movie provides.

The Arthouse Film Festival has been busy lately. As part of Monday night’s screening, they showed us the latest production of Macbeth, aka ‘The Scottish Play’, one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays.

Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) is a Scottish Feudal Lord, who’s leading King Duncan’s forces against a rebellion. Before he enters into the last battle of the war, he is told by three witches that he will one day become King. He is triumphant, and returns home to his wife (Marion Cotillard), and he informs her of the prophecy. King Duncan (David Thewlis) arrives to celebrate the victory. Lady Macbeth convinces her husband to kill the king and take the throne. He does so, but only after chasing off the King’s son, Malcolm (Jack Reynor) and implicating him in the assassination. Macbeth takes the throne, but his sanity starts disappearing.

Shakespeare can be rough to follow. Reading it is difficult, but hearing it spoken is generally the best way to experience it. In this case, the movie is very stylistic, with several scenes of slow motion, and whispers where monologues are supposed to take place. The movie uses Scottish accents, as well, making it hard to follow for this American. I personally have never seen Macbeth before, so I can’t comment on the nature of the portrayal. The set designers made prodigious use of lighting and fog, most of which was done well.

I liked the film, but I don’t know that I could recommend it, unless you’ve experienced Shakespeare before, and know what to expect.

Yet another screening from The Arthouse Film Festival. James White‘s a rather small, independent film, with some rather poignant and intense situations.

James White (Christopher Abbott) is a twenty-something, who’s a layabout, doing nothing with his life. He arrives at the shiva that his mother Gail (Cynthia Nixon) has set up for her husband (not his father). He bumps into Ben (Ron Livingston), who is an editor for the magazine his step father worked for, and says he’ll interview James for a position. James is rather frustrated, so he chases everyone out, and argues with his mother. She’s trying to honor her husband, but James is annoyed, since they’re not Jewish. He storms out, but comes back, saying he needs some time away to get his act back together.

James ends up in Mexico. He befriends a girl on vacation with her parents. Jayne (Makenzie Leigh) takes to him immediately, but while he’s there, his mother calls. James rushes home to find that Gail’s cancer, which was in remission, has returned. He devotes his time to taking care of her, but it’s a losing battle. What is he going to do – face this head on, or run away, like every other difficult thing he’s ever had to do?

I hated James, as a character. Yes, he’s young, and he acts like he’s owed something, but whatever it is, it’s something he will never get. Christopher Abbott’s performance is very good, as we see James go past the breaking point. Cynthia Nixon’s performance is superb. This film snuck up on me, as I drew some parallels with my own life, but fortunately I did not have to endure the severity of James’ suffering.

I strongly recommend this movie.

Mustang is one of the latest films from The Arthouse Film Festival. It is a film shot in Turkey, but was a collaborative event with French and German backers. It is France’s submission for Best Foreign Language film for the Academy Awards for 2015.

In an oppressive society, 5 orphaned sisters live with their grandmother. An harmless incident playing with some boys after school leads their Uncle to remove them from society, to stay at home until they can be married off. They are taught cooking and cleaning, and all the necessary skills. They still manage to sneak out and have fun when they can. Lale, the youngest, is a fan of soccer, hears about a soccer match where the crowd is women-only, so she works out getting on a local bus to the game. Their grandmother spots them on TV, and their uncle realizes they escaped, and turns their grandmother’s home into a jail for them. They all dream of escape, but Lale starts making plans…

This was a ‘slice of life’ film. You get some insight on a culture you wouldn’t otherwise see. It was thrilling towards the climax, in a way you would hope for, but not actually expect. There are some very shocking turns in the film, so it’s not all fun and games.

Recommended.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 is the final movie adaptation from The Hunger Games series. Originally written by Suzanne Collins, she contributed to the movie adaptation.

The revolution is in full swing. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is holed up in District 13, with many rebel forces, led by President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). The fight is going well, and they expect to be invading the capital within a few days. The movie starts with Katniss in the hospital, recovering after being injured when her team snuck in to rescue Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the clutches of President Snow (Donald Sutherland). President Snow had brainwashed Peeta into believing that Katniss and the people she represents are a danger to the entire country of Panem. President Snow manipulated Peeta into believing that the rebellion was there to destroy everything that the country represents, using Peeta as a pawn to turn popular opinion against the rebellion. Peeta, though recovered, still believes it all, and would kill Katniss if ever given the chance.

Katniss realizes that the only way to stop the fighting is to kill President Snow, but President Coin refuses to put her directly in harm’s way. Instead, she creates a small ‘strike force’, made up of former Hunger Games winners and specialists. They will be deployed behind the front lines, but pretending to be leading a part of the attacking forces. Her team, lead by Captain Boggs (Mahershala Ali) and Lieutenant Jackson (Michelle Forbes), are given a special device that knows of and can scan for all the booby traps that lie in the capital, so that they can be recorded avoiding them, for propaganda purposes. Katniss is definitely a ‘hero of the people’ and needs to be elevated as such. Coin sends Peeta up to go with the group, thinking he’s been deprogrammed enough to be an asset.

The fight goes on, and concludes. Most of the strike force is killed off, though a set of Rube-Goldbergian traps that have been set. The military tactics that the Panem forces use are terrible, and would never be used by a winning army. There is some gross stupidity on display that is probably glossed over for the sake of the story, so they could get to the end. There were several moments where the outcome was telegraphed, but I’ll leave those for you to discover.

This movie drags in several spots. The runtime is 2 hours, 17 minutes. Between the first and second parts, there was perhaps three+ hours of material that was stretched much further than it should have been, but perhaps the film studio only saw dollar signs. There are several ‘endings’, much along the lines the Lord of the Rings endings, but perhaps that was the point. Keep making a movie until they felt it was enough to pad, and then end. I don’t so much find fault with the end as much as I do with the time it took to get there.

Recommended, but for die-hard Hunger Games fans only.

The Intern is a film with modern undertones, touching upon a couple of issues facing both the elderly and the young.

Ben (Robert DeNiro) is a retiree, whose wife has passed away. It’s been several years since then. He’s taken all the trips, and visited his children enough, and he feels there is something more to be done. He stumbles across an ad for active seniors looking for work as interns. One of his neighbors, Patty (Linda Lavin), tells him it’s a waste of time, but she’d rather spend that time with him, instead. Rather than sit by and fade away, he lands a job at an online fashion retailer.

That company is run by Jules (Anne Hathaway). She started the company with the goal of being service-minded. Anyone, she says, can have an online business, but hers would be better than anyone at customer service. She sells clothing that just fits as you would expect, but is involved in all aspects. Her partner Cameron (Andrew Rannells) reminds her of the company’s elderly intern program, and recommends that she take one of the retirees as a direct subordinate, to set the example for the rest of the company. Naturally, she’s reluctant to use Ben, but that transpires, he spends time learning about the company, and assisting people as needed. He is very observant, and is able to guide people into doing what’s right and necessary, both in work, and their outside lives.

Through a series of inconsequential circumstances, she comes to rely on him more than she ever thought she would. Ben becomes Jules’ driver, and manages to insinuate himself into her family. Jules’ husband is a stay-at-home dad, raising their daughter while she runs the company. She’s so irritated by Ben’s attentiveness that she reassigns him, but we come to find he’s more valuable to her than she wants to admit. There’s external pressure from her backers to hire a CEO, who can help shape the company better and take some of the load off of her so she falls apart from the pressure. Jules is putting on a brave face, because she’s baring the success of company on her shoulders alone.

There are comedic elements to this film that play well, but this is first and foremost a drama. The story could have gone in a different direction along those lines, but thanks to a well-written script and good direction, it does not stumble. There are a couple of turning points, and there were scenes that did not play out on screen, and that was the right decision. This is a character driven story, and the focus remains on the characters that matter. The resolution was very satisfying, and well worth the time.

Recommended.