Dominic Cooke’s On Chesil Beach is two-thirds of a great movie. The scenes with Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle* are taut, troubling, and also have enough heart that you want the couple to make it through their wedding night. After we leave Chesil Beach, it’s a bunch of awkward aging makeup and the movie heads in an obvious direction.
Verdict: Skip unless you are a Saoirse Ronan completist or enjoy two-thirds of a good movie.
Cost: free via Multnomah County Library DVD Where watched: at home
As someone whose personal blog has been gradually taken over by photos of buildings, I am the prime audience for Director Kogonada’s Columbus.* While Haley Lu Richardson** and John Cho grapple with lives in flux, the modernist buildings of Columbus, Indiana provide a framework for the film’s narrative. It’s a movie full of small moments and stunning architecture, and both the moments and the buildings are beautiful.
Verdict: Recommended
Cost: free via Kanopy, the Multnomah County Library’s streaming service Where watched: at home.
*I’m also a fan of slice-of-life stories with characters at turning points. **This is three films in two weeks with Ms. Richardson. She played the friend in Edge of Seventeen, and an enthusiastic waitress in Support the Girls. I will also most likely see her soon in Five Feet Apart, because movies based on YA novels area always a priority.
Director Alex Lehmann’s Paddleton is chock full of things I like.* Ray Romano** captures many unsaid things as Andy, the friend who not only will be left behind, but also is helping his best Michael friend to exercise his right to die before cancer kills him. I was looking for sorrow to turn me inside out and that did not occur, but I still found a lot to love in this story.
Verdict: Good
Cost: Netflix monthly subscription fee $7.99 Where watched: at home
*Changing friendships, male friendships, the lives of middle-aged unmarried men, movies made by the Duplass brothers, sad things, quirky details like a made up game. **Who I know about, but whose body of work I am not familiar with because I never watched Everybody Loves Raymond
Julian Schnabel takes some chances in At Eternity’s Gate and those chances paid off for Willem Dafoe, who was nominated in the Best Actor category for an Academy Award. It didn’t fully pay off for me as this movie was slow, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes open.* I liked how they dealt with the dreaded accent thing,** and the visual things were interesting, almost enough to get me to stop thinking about the fact that a 63-year-old man was portraying a painter who died at 37.
Verdict: skip, unless the visual things intrigue you
Cost: $1.75 via Redbox Where watched: at home
Consider watching instead some other movie with Willem Dafoe, like The Florida Project, or The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou
*Indeed, I took a short break and napped for 30 minutes so I could more fully watch the film. **You know, when the actors all talk with some sort of quasi-English accent, except they are (mostly) Americans playing people who are say, French. This movie starts in French, which sets the tone, but then most of the film the actors talk in standard American English.
Director Todd Strauss-Schulson calls out many of the romantic comedy tropes in Isn’t it Romantic, a film that is fun for lovers of romantic comedies and stands on its own as a peppy comedy. I’m quite glad someone gave Rebel Wilson a starring vehicle, because I’ve been waiting for her to be featured in something since 2012’s Pitch Perfect. For people aware of the romantic comedy arc, this is a predictable film, but that can be easily pushed aside to enjoy amusing performances as well as Wilson’s reactions to the romantic comedy her life has become.
Verdict: Good
Cost: $7.05 (the “bargain” night at Regal has become not so much of a bargain.) (Though free because the boyfriend had gift cards.) Where watched: Regal City Center Stadium 12 with the boyfriend.
Five women are nominated for best actress.* Let’s talk about their performances.
*I think the Academy will be the last to regularly use the term “actress.” In the past five years or so, there’s been a gradual change to calling all people who act “actors” regardless of their gender.
Glenn Close, nominated for The Wife.
The Castleman’s are flying to Stockholm
As mentioned in my review, the movie The Wife is only so-so. But Close’s performance is superb, with a ton of nuance. Now and then she tosses a few clues about what the real story is, but nothing too obvious. Her performance, combined with the number of nominations she’s received, has me wondering if this is her year.
Fun fact I just learned: Close has been the voice of Mona Simpson/Mother Simpson on the TV series The Simpsons, since 1995.
Lady Gaga, nominated for A Star is Born
Nothing says awesome like getting a Best Actress nomination for your first movie. And Lady Gaga deserves it. She had very big shoes to fill (Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland) and she also needed to ground the music-world-version in something better than Barbara Streisand did in the terrible version of the film. I remained skeptical that this version could restore the glory, but in the 2018 version of A Star is Born, Ms. Germanotta was luminescent. And that’s why she might win.
Fun fact: her 2016 performance of the song “‘Till it Happens to You” had me thinking that song was a shoe-in for best song that year. But it did not win.
Melissa McCarthy, nominated for Can You Ever Forgive Me
Melissa McCarthy is amazing. Not only does she have the best reaction shot in the business* she can bring it to the dramas, too. In Can You Ever Forgive Me? she took a character few people liked and had us all rooting for her from the first scene. I’d love for her to win, but I don’t think it will happen.
Fun fact: Apparently, she played a character named Sandra in one of my favorite films that captures the 90s: Go.
*A few years ago, a pre-movie ad for some car was so funny it reminded me I’d not yet seen Spy. I remedied that in the next week and was justly rewarded.
In The Favourite, Olivia Colman’s performance as Queen Anne was mesmerizing. Plus, she had to share screen time with two other captivating performers, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone. Much like Melissa McCarthy, Colman found the humanity in Queen Anne. She also captured the less-than-savory aspects of the regent. If we’re not rewarding Glenn Close for her many nominations, Colman just might be the winner.
Fun fact: I have no fun facts, because this was my introduction to Colman. It won’t be her last performance I see.
Yalitza Aparico, nominated for Roma
I’m sensing a bit of a turn against Roma and its many nominations. There seems to be an undercurrent of grousing about the film. But Yalitza Aparico’s performance remains exquisite.* Like the best servants, she doesn’t give away much. Which means when emotion does slip through, it’s that much more powerful. I’m guessing she’s a long-shot candidate, and this might be the last we see of her. But even if we just get this performance, it will be one for the ages.
Fun fact: she also has a BA in early childhood education.
*She is also nominated for Best Actress for her first film. Well done, Ms. Aparico!
Kelly Fremon Craig’s excellent The Edge of Seventeen has popped up on Netflix and this review is here to convince you to watch the film. Nadine (played by the incredibly talented Hailee Steinfeld) has a life that isn’t hard at all,* and yet it’s very hard.** This film does three things very well: it captures female adolescent angst like few films do; it contains hilarious and (to me at least) familiar depictions of awkward flirting, and oh, my goodness, it is funny.
Verdict: Recommended
Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($7.99) Where watched: at home. And it was good enough to draw the boyfriend in.
*She lives in a nice house, has a middle-class level of resources, and a best friend. **She’s the kind of girl who powers through a world that doesn’t operate the way she does, her father died and left her to navigate the world alone, and her best friend just started dating her older brother, whom she cannot stand.
Andrew Bujalski gives us a great gift in Support the Girls and that gift is Lisa (Regina Hall) as the general manager of a sports bar.* I’m a great fan of slice-of-life stories about people who matter not at all in the global sense, but matter tremendously if you are the person in their orbit and this is that kind of film. All of these women, who could have come off as the worst kind of stereotypes, are complex and interesting and that made for a stellar move experience.
*The kind where the waitresses don’t wear much in the way of clothing.
Verdict: Recommended
Cost: $3.99 via Google Play
Where watched: at home
It’s been slim pickins in the Channing Tatum movie world of late* and so you would think I would have done something besides groan when I first watched the Smallfoot trailer.** I did groan, but no matter, completist that I am, I knew I had to watch it sooner or later, and so I have and I can say that it’s a pretty good kids film. My favorite part was James Corden’s revamp of Queen’s “Under Pressure,” but you can find that on YouTube (and at the bottom of this post) and skip watching the movie.
Verdict: Good (this is one of those “good” ratings where I don’t love the movie, but recognize that it’s fine for its category.)
Cost: $1.75 via Redbox
Where watched: at home waiting for the wintery weather to start.
*Though there’s the delightful gift of that Pink video. **I have very little tolerance for full-on kids movies and that’s what this movie is.
Bjorn Runge’s The Wife is a perfect vehicle for Glenn Close’s seventh Oscar nomination and, aside from her performance, a so-so movie. While Close’s performance is nuanced, Jonathan Pryce was all over the place and mostly a distracting presence.* This exists also as a movie where audiences can say after the credits roll, “Thank goodness it’s not like that today!” which is a statement I wish were true.
Verdict: skip, unless you are in it for the Glenn Close performance
Cost: Free from Multnomah County Library (my first Lucky Day Movie!**) Where watched: at home
*His accent came and went which was perhaps an attempt to show his informal home-life self and his formal Nobel-winning writer self. This attempt was not successful. It also seemed like he couldn’t quite nail his character’s view of Glenn Close as the wife. **New movies that don’t go into the hold system, but hang out at the branches waiting for you to snap them up! They’ve had this system for books for years now, I’m excited to see it for movies too.
