Movie column by Eleanor Ringel Cater
It could be said that every generation gets the vigilante “Death Wish” hero it deserves.
In which case, Baby Boomers have been extremely lucky.
Eastwood and Bronson in our 20s and 30s. Bruce Willis in our 40s. And now Liam Neeson for our 50s and beyond.
Cinderella has always been something of a slippery glass slipper for feminists. Actually, it has been for just about anyone who wonders about the wisdom of trusting your future to a shoe size.
But cultures of all sorts have been saying yes to the dress (and the pumpkin coach and the lizard livery men) for eons. There is, quite simply, something primal and ineradicable about finding your True Love and finding out he’s also, literally, a True Prince.
“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is, hands down, the second best movie ever made about the Marigold Hotel.
That said, it’s not half bad. And it knows its target audience inside out, something more movies should aspire to.
The first “Marigold” gathered together a group of British, um, seniors and sent them off to India where they all discovered a new passion for life. That these seniors included some of the best actors on earth turned a small-scale charmer from meh to memorable.
The hold that classic TV stars have on us can be remarkable — as strong, in its way, as that of a Henry Fonda or a Lauren Bacall.
Think of losing Lucy. And now, Leonard Nimoy, the once and forever Mr. Spock.
Yet Nimoy did have a presence outside of “Star Trek.” I saw him on stage once, in his one-man show about Vincent Van Gogh. And he made an impression in the movies, too.
When I bought my ticket for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” I fully expected to be the Submissive in the theatre.
Alas, I was a reluctant Dominant because the movie itself is such a mousey, uninvolving little thing that somebody had to step up. Basically, I kept myself interested by making little jokes in my head. An example:
In the movie, Sadistic Title Character says to Virginal Innocent: “You’re biting your lip.”
Me (as Mr. Grey) “Let me bite that for you…”
Oscars are upon us and I have to say I don’t have a dog in this hunt.
You know, some years, you think your heart will break if “True Grit” (Bridges version) doesn’t win. And it doesn’t.
Other years, you think you would want to send a cyanide-laced box of chocolates to every Academy member who voted for “Forrest Gump.” But you don’t.
But Oscars 2015 simply elicit some random musings.
George S. Kaufman once offered his daughter the following advice: “Sample everything in life. Except incest and folk dancing.
I pass no judgment on folk dancing, but it was, perhaps, in this spirit that I decided to sample the new sci-fi extravaganza, “Jupiter Ascending.”
A gaudy and chaotic guilty pleasure, the movie is as relentlessly (simultaneously?) over-done and under-cooked as I expected.
For Lewis Carroll’s Alice, things keep getting curiouser and curiouser.
For Alice Howland, exquisitely played by Julianne Moore in the new movie, “Still Alice,” things get curiousier and curiouser, and then scarier and scarier.
You see, Alice, a respected, prize-drenched professor of linguistics at Columbia, is experiencing early-onset Alzheimer’s.
I’m starting to worry about J. C. Chandor’s box office karma.
First he made the amazing “Margin Call,” a thrillingly smart movie about Wall Street meltdown. The searing dialogue gave you whiplash and everywhere you looked, you saw major actors. Like, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, etc.
Hard to believe, the Oscar nominations were just announced on Jan. 15. Almost as hard to believe: the Academy Awards ceremony doesn’t happen until February 22.
Why the feeling of being time-outta-mind? Because we’ve already seen red carpets, presenters, stars, winners, losers and – did I mention – red carpets over and over and over again.
Oddly absent from many year-end lists and critics’ awards, “American Sniper” is a considerable return to form for Clint Eastwood. At 84, he can still bat one out of the park as impressively as anyone in Hollywood.
The baseball analogy is, perhaps, an unconscious reference to one of his lesser and more recent efforts: the amiable but unremarkable “Trouble with the Curve.”
Or maybe it’s simply my subconscious — reaching back to one of the battier moments of the last Presidential campaign in which Eastwood lectured an empty chair.
Not since Nicole Kidman in “The Hours” has a nose so totally defined a performance.
As zillionaire John du Pont in “Foxcatcher,” Steve Carell is initially unrecognizable. His false beak seems to unbalance his entire head, which tilts backwards making the notion of “looking down your nose at someone” a physical reality.
The first sounds you hear in “Wild” are gasps, moans, quick in-takes of breathe. It could be a woman having an orgasm.
Hardly.
“Whiplash” could well be called “An Officer and a Gentleman and a Drummer.”
The conflict is essentially the same. An outsider-ish youngster with “something special” runs into an enigmatic martinet who’s determined to tear the kid down so he can (ultimately) realize his own potential.
As an actor, Tommy Lee Jones’ career has been hit and miss. For every “The Fugitive” or “Men in Black,” he’s had a “Man of the House” or “Men in Black 3.” (“MIB II” wasn’t all that either.)
But as a director, he’s batted it out of the park. Twice. First with the eloquent and little-seen “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” and now with the hardscrabble brilliance of “The Homesman.”
The glamour names were Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese. But not one of them contributed more to the cinematic zeitgeist of the last 50 years than Mike Nichols.
How did a Berlin-born Jewish refugee become the voice of a generation? A generation he wasn’t even part of. Nichols was in his late 30s when he made “The Graduate,” which became the iconic film for the “Never trust anyone over 30” crowd.
“Interstellar” isn’t interminable. It only seems that way.
Further, it only seems that way during the second hour. That’s the Geeks Gone Wild part during which some intrepid astronauts do some extremely high-tech fiddling around with fancy dials. They also engage in daunting sci-fi dialogue about relativity, space-time continuums and all that other stuff that made many of us so very glad we’d chosen English Lit as our college major.
The last time we saw a movie about an amnesiac who needed to be reminded every morning who she was and what was what, Adam Sandler was courting Drew Barrymore in “50 First Dates.”
“Before I Go to Sleep” turns that concept on its head. And casts it in a much darker hue.
This suspense thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth is an efficiently unpleasant little exercise in paranoia and manipulation and spousal abuse — though not necessarily in that order or importance.
As its parenthetical subtitle implies, “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” wraps a cautionary tale inside its pitch-black comedy. Be careful what you wish for — especially if it involves Hollywood or Broadway.
Sometime in the last century, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) seemed to have everything he could wish for.
In another time — say, another century — “Kill the Messenger” would be the talk of the town. Or at least the talk of the water cooler.
It’s the true story of Gary Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, who, in the mid 1990s, uncovered a hell of a story.
