Tag Archives: Matt Weiner

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The Studio’s Apprentice

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Mary and the Witch’s Flower

by Matt Weiner

There’s something about the helpless awkwardness of growing up that guarantees the enduring appeal of magic. Mary and the Witch’s Flower taps into that spirit with appealing grace. And it’s a promising first feature from Studio Ponoc, home to a Studio Ghibli diaspora that formed after the venerable Japanese animation studio announced a production break back in 2014.

When a walk in the woods leads to a chance encounter with special flowers, Mary (voiced by Ruby Barnhill in the English language version) gains temporary magical powers. Her broomstick whisks her away to the magical college Endor, which looks about like if Hogwarts put down stakes in Spirited Away.

Mistaken for a witch and propped up by the magical flowers (apparently the PEDs of the wizarding world), Mary is deemed a prodigy by the excited school faculty. She soon learns she’s not the only one interested in those flowers, and outsider or not it will be up to her to save magic for everyone.

Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Ghibli veteran and Oscar nominee for When Marnie Was There, keeps the visual charm turned up throughout the film—a good thing, given that his script (co-written by Riko Sakaguchi and based on a children’s novel by Mary Stewart) lacks the heft of a typical Ghibli film.

For adult viewers, Yonebayashi’s light touch can be a bit too light. Mary, with her wild hair and strong will, is a charming stand-in for kids, but her hero’s journey will be instantly familiar. Endor professors Madam Mumblechook and Doctor Dee (Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent) exude sinister charm, but the rest of the sparse supporting roles don’t have much to add beyond perfunctory plot points.

These are minor complaints though. And the animation, especially the magical set pieces that test Mary’s mettle, makes up the difference. The film offers up a fully-formed magical world with smart visual economy over exposition (cough Fantastic Beasts cough). Mary’s determination is contagious, and even if her saving the day is inevitable it’s impossible not to feel moved by the choices she makes to get there.

For all the magic that infuses Endor, Doctor Dee was on the right track when he told Mary that electricity is just another form of magic. If Mary and the Witch’s Flower doesn’t always have the preternatural spirit that animates the best of Studio Ghibli, it’s a delightful visual successor even when it’s working a little harder to keep the spark alive.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of December 11

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Some exceptional films coming home this week, so if you like true life, brutally devastating historical dramas, this is your week! No, seriously, watch them.

Detroit

Viceroy’s House

The Trip to Spain

Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Home Again

New In Theaters

Exit Stanton

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Lucky

by Matt Weiner

It’s a fitting tribute to the range of Harry Dean Stanton that his career could’ve ended with just about any role and you could decently argue, “Well, that makes sense.” But to give us Lucky at the end of a decades-long career is nothing short of one last cosmic joke at the non-religious character’s expense: God not only exists, but is a huge Harry Dean Stanton fan.

Lucky is the debut feature from John Carroll Lynch, who is, like Stanton, a gifted character actor probably used to being called “ohhh that guy!” And with Lucky (written by Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja), the collaboration between Lynch and Stanton is pitch-perfect.

As Lucky, Stanton carries more weight than his brittle frame should bear. Lucky is a 90-year-old World War II veteran who has seemingly outlived everything save death. A minor fall and a visit with the town doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) prods the tequila-drinking, cigarette-smoking atheist Lucky to maybe, finally, reflect on his mortality, which he does begrudgingly through a series of interactions with local friends and strangers.

With little more than a light of his cigarette or a hoarse whisper of “bullshit,” Lucky makes it clear that he hasn’t the time or interest in what comfort God or religion has to offer in a world of horrors and loss. Yet the film is deeply—reverently—spiritual.

Lucky is the spiritual heir of Max von Sydow’s knight from The Seventh Seal, if he got to live out his days through the funhouse of America. The oppressive Lutheranism of Ingmar Bergman has been replaced by a more searching acceptance—and both films uncomfortably force us to make our own peace with the time we have.

If Lucky doesn’t waver in his beliefs, he can still realize a sort of spiritual enlightenment. You get the sense, with his age and relative good health, that Lucky is more afraid of being immune to destiny than of dying, and how can anyone find meaning in that?

Thankfully, the film gives Lucky perfectly cast sounding boards to figure it out by way of the supporting characters, especially a show-stealing turn from David Lynch as a man in mourning for his lost tortoise, President Roosevelt. (That this doesn’t crack the top five strangest moments in the history of David Lynch/Harry Dean Stanton collaborations is saying something.)

John Carroll Lynch chooses to leave us with something hovering between resolution and reservation, as if Lucky is one long Zen koan. But knowing how things end doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to discover. Watching Stanton in any performance is to see flashes of some elusive truth buried within his characters. Watching him as Lucky is an untouchable capstone.

 

 

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Whisky Dicks

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Kingsman: The Golden Circle

by Matt Weiner

There was a fleeting moment early in Kingsman: The Golden Circle when I thought that the new film might be atoning for the biggest misfire in the first one. One hour and one novel use of an inside-the-body POV shot later, I realized I should have known better.

Just like first movie, Kingsman: The Golden Circle (again directed by Matthew Vaughn, and written by Vaughn and Jane Goldman) delights in its attempts to set up the familiar contours of a spy movie and then gleefully take the piss out of them, to hell with audience expectations.

Unfortunately, the film also doubles down on everything—the good, the bad and the truly repulsive—from the first one.

We barely have time to be reunited with Eggsy aka “Galahad” (Taron Egerton), Merlin (Mark Strong) and the rest of Kingsman before the two men find themselves all alone against a worldwide threat yet again. (This would be a good time to point out that for a super-secret highly trained spy agency, it sure seems easy to wipe them out every few years.) Following the only lifeline they’ve got, Galahad and Merlin head to America to revive a special relationship with Statesman, their booze-swilling, Southern-drawling counterparts.

The Statesman universe is an American funhouse of Kingsman, complete with a lone Q-type (Halle Berry) somehow serving the entire agency. While the Statesman introduction gets in a few digs at us bumpkins across the pond, it’s hard not to sense that the main purpose is to tease some big names for future installments. That, and also—spoiler—to explain the resurrection of Eggsy’s mentor, Harry Hart (Colin Firth).

Working together, Kingsman and Statesman cut, shoot and lasso a swath of carnage across the globe in pursuit of drug lord and big-time Elton John fan Poppy (Julianne Moore) attempting to murder hundreds of millions.

I want to like the world of Kingsman. I really do. The first film was fresh, briskly shot and gave its characters enough room and heart to make you overlook the script’s shortcomings. And despite the runtime bloat in The Golden Circle, the kinetic violence and over-the-top parody keeps the action moving.

But for a pastiche that has no reservations transcending its source material when it comes to sending up action and plotting, it’s impossible to ignore how the same can’t be said for the movie’s treatment of women.

This is, after all, a film where dogs play a more emotional role in the narrative arc than most of the female leads, and a running bit about reluctant anal sex is no longer the grossest punchline in the franchise. So congrats on that distinction, I guess.

But that’s not cheeky. It’s just dull. And it’s unforgivable in any film—but especially in one that so desperately wants to be seen as clever.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of September 4

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So many movies of the brand-spankin’ variety available this week in home viewing. You’ve got your bona fide awesomeness, some better-than-you-think big budget bombs, and one flaming piece of garbage. And more! More! So much, there may be no reason to leave home all week. Except to go see It, of course.

Raw

The Wedding Plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDn73s-oEJc

Megan Leavy

All Eyez on Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VC0aSPfyQk

Rough Night

Paris Can Wait

New In Theaters

A Tale of Two Catherines

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The Midwife

by Matt Weiner

There is a scene early on in The Midwife that consists almost entirely of a conversation between Beatrice (Catherine Deneuve) and her doctor, in which Beatrice says barely a word and yet the camera doesn’t move from her face the entire time.

Director and writer Martin Provost allows moments like these to unfold again and again throughout the film, relying on superb performances and an unsentimental treatment of the material to present an arresting and spare meditation on love and the passage of time.

Claire (Catherine Frot) is an uptight midwife in Paris whose grim adherence to routine seems on the verge of upheaval, both professionally and personally. This coincides with the free-spirited Beatrice, the mistress of Claire’s dead father, reappearing out of nowhere.

It’s a familiar setup: Claire and Beatrice are natural foils, and they both have some unexorcised emotions to work out over the man they both loved, in their own ways. But that relationship between Claire and Beatrice is the main attraction, and the two actresses work off one another in a way that keeps things poignant, never melodramatic.

Deneuve, in particular, is equal parts devastating and disarming as Beatrice. It’s fitting that at this point in her career, she’s now deconstructing the haughty mystery that she become indelibly associated with over the last 50 years.

What happens when life finally strips away all the defensive layers and artifice that a woman like Beatrice has worked so hard to maintain? What remains when you’re all alone save a body that’s slowly betraying you?

The film doesn’t answer all these questions. And, beguilingly, neither does Deneuve. As circumstances force Beatrice to part with all her glamorous trappings, she holds onto her defiance. And some of her reticence.

In The Midwife, it’s not death that the characters are afraid of—it’s all the indignity that time heaps on us in between being born and dying. Babies “spring out from nothing,” Claire observes. Controlling as she is, Claire can only do so much for those she has brought into the world.

What anyone chooses to make of their time afterward, the film suggests, is all part of the mystery, joy and frustration of being alive.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

New In Theaters

Hiroshima Story

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In This Corner of the World

by Matt Weiner

The animated film In This Corner of the World contrasts one of the single most destructive acts of war—the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—alongside a decade of daily life for the inhabitants of Hiroshima and the neighboring port city of Kure.

Suzu (Rena Nounen) is a free-spirited young girl with a talent for art that gets reflected in the film’s beautifully drawn seascapes and pre-war countryside. Suzu’s recollections, emotions and eventual tragedies are inextricably tied to the fantastical watercolors that make up the animated film’s palette.

The effect is beautiful—and unsettling. Writer-director Sunao Katabuchi centers a war movie around non-combatants. Loved ones die and faceless air raids bombard Kure. But Katabuchi grounds the Japan’s participation in World War II around Suzu’s family and other townspeople, blending uneventful tedium, Suzu’s vibrant drawings and matter-of-fact catastrophe to convey a routinization of horror that’s far more emotionally devastating than most war movies.

So when Suzu moves from Hiroshima to live with her new husband Shusaku (Yoshimasa Hosoya) and his family, it’s disarmingly easy to keep the effects of war on the periphery—as Suzu herself does. The film allows the escalating seriousness to insert itself into Suzu’s colorful idylls more and more as the date of the fateful bombing nears. But even then, these moments are deftly handled as impressionistic memories from a quiet domestic life: a rationing here, a death there—just more brushstrokes, some thicker than others.

When Suzu’s way of life is permanently shattered, she seems to be one of the last to realize that the life she thought she’d be growing into died long ago at the start of the war. It’s fitting that deeply personal violence is the emotional climax for Suzu. The bombing of Hiroshima and all its horrors are an almost perverse falling action, but Katabuchi’s focus on Suzu keeps things poignant and utterly free of sentimentality.

At times, the film’s languorous advance feels a little too at odds with everything going on outside their corner of the world. When coupled with the loose plot, some stretches veer closer to deadweight than emotional weight. But the editing mostly works, with the war on domestic bliss feeling as meaningful as any battle.

This is war under the influence of Ozu—a quiet but singularly focused attention to the ordinary in extraordinary times.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out

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Want to watch something at home? Wow – there’s one thing this week. One. But rest easy – there are like a million things next week, so we’ll just fixate on this one today and then next Tuesday, we’ll have the energy.

Here’s what you can find in new home entertainment. Click the title for a complete review. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.

Life

Verdict-3-0-Stars

For Your Queue, Slider

I Don’t Want to Go Out

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There’s new whatnot ready to stream or BluRay its way into your home! Some of it’s worth a look, some of it’s not. Let us run that down for you.

Click titles for our complete reviews. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.

 

The LEGO Batman Movie

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

John Wick 2

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

Table 19

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

Bitter Harvest

Verdict-2-0-Stars

New In Theaters

Paris Is Yearning

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Paris Can Wait

by Matt Weiner

Have you seen the Coppola film about an unlikely star-crossed couple touring a foreign country? In Paris Can Wait, Eleanor Coppola, better known for her documentaries, writes and directs her first feature film.

Diane Lane plays Anne, the long-suffering wife and de facto personal assistant to a hard-driving producer husband Michael (Alec Baldwin, literally phoning most of his lines in). When Anne needs to get to Paris from Cannes, Michael’s business partner Jacques all too happily offers to drive.

Jacques has a spontaneous lust for life as well as an endless appetite that turns a one-day drive into an unexpected long weekend in close quarters for the pair. Paris Can Wait has some very loud echoes of the meandering “stranger adrift in a strange land” in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.

But the comparison does Eleanor Coppola no favors, instead showing just how respectively undeveloped and soulless Anne and Jacques are. At least Bob Harris knows that his distinguished charm act is just another form of kabuki, whereas Jacques comes across as sincerely committed to his hedonistic shtick.

This by itself wouldn’t torpedo the film, given Arnaud Viard’s effortless bonhomie. But it’s impossible to ignore the complete lack of agency given to Anne up until the very last frame of film. Jacques’s disquisitions on food and wine, art and local history are far too boring to be as one-sided as they are. All their outings together are gorgeously filmed, but Jacques’s conversational M.O. is to recite the first two lines of Wikipedia on any and every subject that comes into his field of vision.

In return, Anne is supposed to derive value from being pelted with the encyclopedia every five minutes. Call it homme-splaining, and then also call the police to rescue Anne from her whimsical weekend of nonconsensual self-discovery.

It’s not that two strangers wandering around a foreign country and talking can’t work—Richard Linklater got a sublime trilogy out of it. But the whole of France isn’t scenic enough to make up for Jacques’s tour guide/hostage taker balancing act. Just how bad is it for Anne? If the film swapped out the soundtrack for tense horror strings, there’s not a single excursion with Jacques that couldn’t naturally segue to a scene of Anne lashed to a bed with both her legs broken.

And somehow the trip stirs up life-changing feelings for both characters. (To be fair, spending an entire weekend feeling like each new adventure is a prelude to a murder would probably change anybody’s outlook on life.) Anne and Jacques each get a last minute, pathos-drenched backstory. But the result is not only forced, it also weakens Lane’s last-ditch attempt to inject a flash of mischief and mystery into Anne’s final moments onscreen.

This makes Paris Can Wait tragedy, not comedy. If Lane is going to be typecast in this sort of role, at least allow her character to flourish. Instead we’re stuck with the Jacques tasting menu: course after course of attractive fluff whether you want it or not, and then someone else gets stuck with the bill.

Verdict-1-0-Star