"Hidden Figures"

 4 / 5  

There are moments when Hidden Figures achieves the near-impossible task of being a quieter, more bookish counterpart to 1983's majestic The Right Stuff, and there are also times when it seems like a lesser and overly earnest HBO docudrama, so while I can barely do basic math without a calculator, I'd say that the cinematic average of those two extremes gives us a simple solution to a complex formula: Hidden Figures is a very good movie.

If it falls just short of achieving orbit, it's not the fault of the three truly remarkable actresses -- Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe -- who are at the center of the film, which tells the true story of three genius-level black women who overcome the oppressive segregation of the 1960s to help NASA send white men into space, while working at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, no less.

Henson, Spencer and Monáe, with fine support by Kevin Costner and Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst (both playing slightly villainous roles), make Hidden Figures never less than compelling and frequently outstanding.

But the screenplay, by director Theodore Melfi and Allison Schroeder, contains a frustrating, if laudatory, desire to take on too much.  Even at three and a half hours, The Right Stuff felt condensed, and it wasn't trying to offer up distinctive characters; Hidden Figures tells a parallel, quieter story of how these three particular women contributed, despite the rampant bigotry of the day, and at two hours sometimes feels overstuffed and unfocused.

Henson's character, Katherine Goble, is a "computer" long before we used that word to define the kind of compact metal tablet I'm typing on, a tablet that, it's famously been noted, has more computing power than anything used by the women in Hidden Figures.  She might be one of the smartest people on the planet, but she's a black woman, which in the early 1960s counted for very little at all.

Katherine drives in to work every morning with Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Monáe), where they head to the dingy, underground office reserved for "colored computers."  Their brains are vital to NASA's success, but they're quite literally pushed into a corner, called upon when the "smarter" white men can't figure things out.

As NASA gets deeper into trouble during the Soviet-dominated days of the space race, the agency needs the best brains it can get, so its bureaucracy, represented by the spiteful-because-she-doesn't-know-any-better office manager played by Dunst, who takes the role and manages to give it some humanity.  Katherine Goble, in particular, shines as she is placed into the Space Task Group department headed up by Al Harrison, a fictitious amalgam of all of the buzz-cut-and-white-shirt engineers who got the credit for what NASA accomplished.

The story itself would be dazzling if it were simply about the number-crunchers who made it all work, but the reality that these big brains were dominated by the even bigger brains of Goble, Vaughan and Jackson, who were dismissed and degraded because of their double-strike of being black women makes Hidden Figures very much worth seeing.

And yet the movie is at times miscalculates its trajectory -- its primary problem being that these women are so fascinating and charismatic when at work that their home lives seem bland and drama-free by comparison.  Hidden Figures keeps cutting to their rather ordinary personal lives just when it should be amping up the drama at NASA.

Adding to that, Monáe's engineer character is thinly written, and Spencer's move from computing to programming the massive IBM mainframe is given short shrift.  (In one fine, clever moment, leads her all-black, all-women team out of the tiny office, and the exodus is filmed like the arrival of the Mercury 7 in The Right Stuff, substituting Hans Zimmer's pedestrian score for Bill Conti's soaring strings.) Hidden Figures tends to focus more on Henson, which is hardly a problem given that she is spectacular in the role; a scene in which she courageously, confidently tells off her boss (Costner) might be the most genuine and heartbreaking moment any actress has provided this year.

But it can't quite balance the three characters.  Hidden Figures is so captivated (and rightly so) by Goble's story that Vaughan and Jackson at times seem afterthoughts.  It's only a shame because Spencer and Jackson are both terrific in their roles -- I especially wanted to see more of Monáe, both the actress and her character, because she shines so brightly in her scenes.

In the midst of this too-big story, Hidden Figures also brings in the Mercury astronauts, and it becomes as enamored of John Glenn as The Right Stuff did.  No one will ever quite match what Ed Harris did with that role, but actor Glen Powell cuts a commanding, beguiling figure as the heroic astronaut.

With perfect mid-century production design and some well-considered cinematography that captures the mood exquisitely, there's so much that's right with Hidden Figures that in the end it's much easier for moviegoers to forgive its mistakes than, say, the astronauts to forgive any errors the women or any of their counterparts might have made.  Its personal stories aren't quite as epic as the space flights the women helped make happen -- but it turns out they're just as influential, and maybe even a tiny bit more inspiring.



Viewed Dec. 28, 2016 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1110

"Jackie"

 4.5 / 5  

Watch closely as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy stands in front of a vanity mirror aboard Air Force One places the pink Chanel pillbox hat atop her head.  She is, of course, preparing to descend the steps onto Love Field, accompanied by her husband, the 35th president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy.

As embodied (because it's much more than a portrayal) by Natalie Portman, Jackie does not fuss over the hat.  She sets it in exactly the right position.  So effortlessly does this sort of perfect attention to detail come to Jackie that the moment is over in an instant -- but the way that hat sat upon her head on Nov. 22, 1963, is something no one, even those of us not even alive, will ever forget.

In Jackie, Jackie Kennedy is depicted as a woman of immense contradictions, whose sultry whisper of a voice, seeming timidity, willingness to become a bit of window dressing (as she literally does in the movie's final moments) is at odds with the other sides we see of her.

She has invited a reporter to her husband's family's home in Hyannis Port, Mass. -- she knows it is not and never will belong to her -- just one week after Dallas.  The pretense is that she wants to tell her side of the story, but that is not at all what she wants to do.

Cinematically, director Pablo Larraín makes that clear with the vaguely sinister, disquieting music that opens his film, which has a shockingly literate, nuanced screenplay by Noah Oppenheim.  No, Jackie makes it quite plain to the reporter (Billy Crudup) that she has no intention of giving him an emotional tell-all -- she's not even going to let him write the story he wants.  He is going to write the story she wants.  She knows how a hat should sit on a head -- she's not about to let the public image of JFK be sullied by the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis or failure on civil rights issues; the facts are not going to get in the way.

In that sense, it's a prescient, relevant story, but there's an important distinction: Jackie knows, unlike the incoming occupant of the Oval Office, that images can be shattered, that wealth is not the same as class, that history does not wait for perspective -- it must be molded and shaped immediately.

A week after the assassination of her husband, who slumped lifeless into her lap in America's nightmare on Elm Street, she is ready to do that molding.  She's also angry.  She's bitterly angry at Lee Harvey Oswald, at the "gracious" Johnsons (who, after all, stepped right into the roles of JFK and Jackie without missing a beat), at Washington, at politics, at the Kennedys -- she is angry at everyone because she is grieving.

That, it turns out, is the difficult and tricky subject at the core of the visually arresting, consistently compelling Jackie, and in that regard it is a film very much of a pair with the equally sensitive and nuanced Manchester by the Sea. It shares many of similar observations, but is filtered through a remarkably different lens.  Still, they are both about the numbness of shocking loss, of the impossible weight of dealing with sudden tragedy.

Portman's Jackie goes through every possible permutation of grief in the movie, and she is not just unconcerned about the public perception -- she is simultaneously dismissive and hyper-aware of it.  Her loss was a country's loss, but it was deeply, singularly hers.  Her politician-celebrity husband, who had affairs and required medications and shared a private life with his family, has not just died, but been killed in her arms, in front of her eyes, and now the eyes of everyone are watching her.

Jackie follows her story as she tries to make sense of the senselessness, tries to plan for a funeral while getting evicted from her home, copes with her children as she loses her job.  She has taken that job very seriously, as we see in stunning re-enactments of her televised tour of the White House.  She has brought vision and tenacity to that job, and now it, her husband, her life has been torn away.

This is a deeply personal movie, one that may not have an effect on everyone who sees it.  Portman's dazzling and commanding performance is quiet and careful and studied -- even a little distant, a bit aloof, just as Jackie Kennedy seemed to be.  Both she and the filmmakers know just how fragile a movie like this is, so they are careful not to make any false steps.  Some may say they're too careful, but I was surprised how bold they can be.  In one beautiful, moving scene, Jackie tells a priest (John Hurt) that every night since Dallas she has wanted to die.  It's not a common scene, either in writing or acting: She is forthright about this, about the pain she has suffered.  Only we in the audience know how far her pain is from being over.

Jackie presents this physically small woman as she reaches the breaking point -- and keeps herself together.  In that, Jackie is presents a story that anyone who has experienced loss will recognize.  We go on, but only because we must.



Viewed Dec. 18, 2016 -- Arclight Sherman Oaks

1520

Catching Up: "Florence Foster Jenkins"

 3.5 / 5  

To demonstrate how unhip I am, I learned only earlier this year that experiencing things "ironically" is something people do.  Irony has always, in my life, only been a factor in the spoken or written word, occasionally in life itself when something would happen to confound expectations.

"Irony," except in Alannis Morissette songs, has always seemed to me more a noun than an adverb, then I learned that people were listening to music ironically, they were eating ironically, they were watching TV ironically, they were even taking jobs ironically -- to defy the "system," to stick it to "the man," to let all the old fuddy-duddies know that, let's say, "Bewitched" and Swanson's frozen dinners could be enjoyed ... just not quite in the way intended.

Which gets me around to the least ironic person who ever lived, or at least who ever performed on stage at Carnegie Hall: Florence Foster Jenkins, a socialite, a patron of the wartime New York arts scene, and a women born with a desire to sing.  The primary problem with her desire was that she couldn't.  Not a note.

And yet, her fierce determination and blinders-on approach to life left her with no choice: Once she stood the corner of 57th and 7th and looked up at that edifice, her fate was sealed.   But, then, it was really sealed a long time before that, as far back as the wedding night of her first marriage, when she contracted a nearly fatal case of syphilis from the man she married.   She has dosed herself, day after day, with mercury and arsenic to stave off the worst effects of the illness.  Such sadness and sickness might have dissuaded anyone else, but not this matronly millionaire, played by Meryl Strep with an indefatigable smile.

Everyone in WWII-era New York society knows about Florence Foster Jenkins.  Her "husband" (Hugh Grant) runs a strange ticket-sales system to her rare concerts, a system ruled less by supply and demand than by bribery, intimidation and in some cases simply throwing out the people who won't appreciate Mrs. Jenkins' unique music sense.

Without realizing it, Jenkins has surrounded herself with "yes" men -- "Yes, you sound beautiful, you are an inspiration," says conductor Arturo Toscanini.  Then he asks her for $1,000.  And this is the secret that even Florence herself doesn't know: If she stopped opening her checkbook, everyone would laugh at her instead of grovel at her feet.

The sycophancy extends to the young piano player who accompanies her during her daily lessons, Cosmé McMoon (Simon Helberg), who who quickly moves from being repulsed by Florence Foster Jenkins' singing to stroking her ego, because she is paying him $150 a week.

But it stops at her husband.  Sort of.  First of all, he may or may not really be her husband, second of all, he keeps a mistress on the side and has for most of his decades-long relationship with Florence, and third -- this is the key -- he is genuinely inspired by her.  He knows her story and her secrets, she has shared everything with him, and he knows that the fact that she's even alive is a miracle.  It is the hope of one day being a great singer that keeps her alive, and he knows it.

Florence also supports a tony music-appreciation club, and one day for a Christmas present she decides to make a recording of her singing.  Despite the protests of her husband St. Clair (Hugh Grant, who gives the role a genuinely conflicted humanity), the record gets out.  It gets played on the radio.  People laugh at it.  But they also hear in it something ... well, is inspiring the word?

They hear that Florence, while awful, is trying.  Likewise, they are trying to win a seemingly unwinnable war.  They are dying and getting horribly maimed, but they're really, truly trying.  Just like the fat old lady.

She is as delusional as it gets -- but, is she?   She does believe she can sing, and doesn't as much ignore those who call her terrible as simply pays them no attention. She does believe St. Clair loves her, and Cosmé is devoted to her, even though she sees what they do when she isn't around.  She may be dumb, but she's no dummy.

Still, she makes horrible decisions, like booking Carnegie Hall to hold a concert.  She has seen the soprano Lily Pons perform there, and figures, "If she can do it, so can I."  No one tells her she's terrible.  And then ... she gets on stage and sings.

It all leads to her final, famous line, which is delivered under emotional, affecting circumstances it's best not to reveal.  "They can say I can't sing," she observes.  "They can't say I didn't sing."

Streep, Grant, Helberg and director Stephen Frears, light years away from the despondency of Prick Up Your Ears and in much less a contemplative mood than in The Queen find the human underneath the ridiculous artifice of Florence Foster Jenkins, and they observe, quite rightly, that we all should be so lucky.



Viewed Dec. 17, 2016 -- VOD

"Rogue One"

 2.5 / 5  

In a masterful display of narrative economy, 1977's Star Wars dropped viewers in the middle of an ongoing story by orienting them with a written prologue (fans know it as the "opening crawl") that is by now the stuff of cinematic legend -- if not actual legend:

"It is a period of civil war," it began. "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil galactic Empire.  During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star ..."

For the record, I typed that from memory (though checked it with a quick Google search, I admit), which gives you some idea of the level of awareness I have of the Star Wars films.  I'm not a Star Wars know-nothing.

Those 42 words, a little miracle of backstory, are also the entire plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the new not-quite-a-Star-Wars-film-but-really-a-Star-Wars film -- the first one, it is no small irony, that opens without an opening crawl.

Rogue One is about two and a quarter hours long, which is approximately two and a quarter hours longer than it takes to read those first 42 words.  It has a lot of characters, a lot of action and a lot of talking, but essentially the story is: Rebel spies manage to steal secret plans to the Death Star.

That bit happens in the last 20 or 30 minutes of Rogue One, which are about as good on the action and visual effects front as you could ever, ever hope a Star Wars movie to be.  They're a little too good, as they make the 1977 movie look, by comparison, clunky and sparse.  But there's a huge distinction: Forty years ago, it was possible to watch the very first Star Wars movie with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever about the characters or the setting and come away massively satisfied.  Its creator, George Lucas, knew that the larger story was unimportant -- it wasn't until many, many years after seeing the first film that I even wondered, "What were the star wars even about?"  It didn't matter, nor did it ultimately matter in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, as the tale of Luke Skywalker and his rise from mere farmboy to savior of the galaxy was the real through-line.

In Rogue One, on the other hand, the story and the film's first hour (maybe more) are borderline unintelligible to anyone who does not know what a kyber crystal, a Whill or a Saw Gerrera is before going in.  As I said, I like to think I have a certain level of Star Wars literacy, but Rogue One lost me almost from the get-go.

The movie exerts no effort to orient the audience, either narratively or spatially, a problem exacerbated by the "realistic" and "gritty" look of the film -- as it's often described -- and by the use of 3-D.  These two things do not go well together; the shakiness and the 3-D combined, for me at least, to deliver a physically uncomfortable viewing experience.  If you must see Rogue One, try the good-old 2-D version -- and study up on your Star Wars.

But, really, should a film require this much foreknowledge to deliver enjoyment?  Certainly the audience I saw it with was in on every single reference -- and there are many, many references to other Star Wars movies throughout Rogue One, to the point that it is exclusionary.

It also makes an entire galaxy seem like a very small place -- everyone wears the same basic styles of clothing, every planet seems to have the same style of homestead and the same sort of bustling marketplace.

It's odd, really, how the two most recent Star Wars movies reduce it all into a really specific and narrow field of view.  Despite having a whole galaxy of potential stories to tell, everything keeps coming back to a particular set of characters and a particular timeframe.  For all of their many faults, George Lucas's Star Wars prequels attempted to tell a more theatrical, more formal (many would say more stilted) and sweeping story, which is not what is in the interests of building the marketable franchise.

It's quite a surprise, to me at least, how specific Rogue One insists on being.  It aims to be the prequel that Lucas himself failed -- to the derision of fans -- to deliver, to tell the story of what happened right before the first movie.  And I do mean right before.

If the prequels' greatest miscalculation was to try to tell a large-scale backstory of villainous Darth Vader, Rogue One's primary goal is to show him on screen again, and finds a way to do exactly that -- not worrying, I guess, that his one scene of dialogue provides an uncomfortable Star Wars first: Vader delivers a zinger, a line of dialogue actually calculated to get the audience to giggle.

It's a peculiar choice for the film, but it makes a certain sense.  The audience I saw Rogue One with laughed appreciatively, a few people even clapped, when he said the line, because they got the joke.  And that's the major problem I had with Rogue One.  A movie has to be more than an in-joke, it has to do more than satisfy an audience who can read between each line of dialogue for themselves.

As it told its paper-thin story of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a girl who is part of the rebellion against the Empire and ultimately leads a the aforementioned attack on Imperial facilities in order to steal the aforementioned plans to the aforementioned space station, it all seemed ... unnecessary.  Rogue One isn't a film calculated to stir many more emotions than recognition.  It takes the long and circuitous route to get to the final attack, filling Erso's adventure with characters like Diego Luna's morally ambiguous intelligence agent, Riz Ahmed's earnest pilot, and Alan Tudyk's sassy droid, K2SO.  He's the best character in the movie, but he's also the only one who really registers a strong personality.

When it finally happens, though, that extended final battle sequence generally succeeds.  If nothing else, it's certainly one of the most eye-popping and visually satisfying spectacles of any of the Star Wars movies.  And for anyone who grew up on Star Wars movies, there will be a certain satisfaction toward the end.  But mostly, Rogue One seems intentionally custom-made for those who are thoroughly steeped in Star Wars lore.  It is not a film for the uninitiated.

Is that enough?  I suspect that for many people it will be more than enough -- they will understand every frame of it, and will gasp and applaud at all of the right times.  But if you don't inherently know who Grand Moff Tarkin is, why his appearance is so noteworthy (which explains his odd and disquieting appearance), or what his functional role in the overall story is, Rogue One will feel ... puzzling.  You'll may, quite literally, not know what's going on.

For the Star Wars faithful, a roomful of Rancors couldn't keep them away.  For everyone else, Rogue One will be a genuine challenge to sit through.

And for those of us in between?  I guess it depends.   I never imagined that I would rate only a C-minus on a Star Wars literacy test, but that's what Rogue One felt like -- and barely passing left me feeling deeply, hopelessly inadequate.




Viewed Dec. 15, 2016 -- ArcLight Hollywood

1930

"La La Land"

 5 / 5  

La La Land is the real thing, an authentic, original, widescreen musical that's all-singing, all-dancing, all-splendid in the way movies were before we became too weary and cynical for them.

Maybe we've become so cynical, weary, angry and violent that we're ready for La La Land, a musical unlike any we've seen in recent years, one that does not strain under the weight of trying to revive a dead genre but finds a sweet, giddy freedom in the knowledge that it's been decades since anyone tried anything this ... musical.

Chicago shot new energy into the art form back in 2002, but even it wasn't like this -- it used well-known source material and was still a movie of the times, sly and a bit sinister.  La La Land is different, special, so precariously balanced on the edge of sweetness and silliness that one false step will push it all the way over, but Damien Chazelle, its writer-director, and especially Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, its movie stars, don't make a single mistake.

It's not that they don't come close: The opening number is just a tad too much like a music video, and for a few brief moments in the middle where the pacing almost falters, but even these almost-missteps are like watching a wire walker who pretends to lose her balance; in fact, La La Land knows exactly what it's doing and where it's going.  And when it gets there, boy -- well, hold on, let me go back to the start.

La La Land opens on a familiar scene of gridlock on an L.A. freeway, but instead of road rage the drivers break into a sunny, sweet opening song that ends by introducing its two leads: hopeful actress Mia (Emma Stone) and frustrated jazz musician Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who pass each other by but will meet again soon enough.

For much of its first 30 minutes or so, La La Land seems like a cute, music-infused L.A. satire, a less surreal updating of Steve Martin's 1990 love-it-or-hate-it L.A. Story, with which it shares a certain stylized, bemused perspective.  (It also echoes with the sounds of a surprising source, Martin Scorsese's dour and failed but fascinating musical experiment, New York, New York.)

Mia and Sebsatian inhabit a world that is just a little too bright, just a little too simple.  In this L.A., it's seemingly always "magic hour," that twilight time of cobalt-and-amber skies, and before long the rhythm that Chazelle is setting becomes clear: By the time the two engage in a Cole Porter-inspired hate-you-but-love-you song high above the twinkling lights, La La Land has become irresistible.

While it's already charming and lovely, it's not quite intoxicatingly swoonable, not yet -- that doesn't happen until its final act, which achieves the near-impossible task of mixing cinematic vision with real, vital emotion.  To do that, La La Land goes back to the beginning, in a soaring ballet-style sequence that belongs alongside the very best musical moments ever put on screen.

These are the sort of superlatives that you're going to find hard to believe, I'm sure, and maybe you should be dubious of my perspective.  I might just be in the throes of infatuation, of cinematic puppy love -- but I've got a sneaking suspicion that you're likely to feel about La La Land the way I felt about it, the way you felt long ago after dizzy, giggly first dates that ended at the door with a kiss and a smile and a wistful wondering of how it might have been if you had let it go on just a little while longer.

Even more remarkable is that Chazelle doesn't let it go on a moment too long, he knows exactly when to finish and how to bring La La Land to pitch-perfect conclusion, which left me wanting to go back and watch it all over again.  It's got such a perfect blend of sweetness and sadness (though to say more would be unfair) that it leaves you almost light-headed.

There's something else going on under the gorgeous surface, though.  About midway through its story, La La Land introduces a new character, Keith (John Legend), who confronts Sebastian with a harsh reality: The pianist's love for jazz, much like Mia's infatuation with old black-and-white movie stars, is a losing battle.  Jazz is dying, he says, and the urge to protect it is only going to hasten its demise.  It was created by people who were willing to dare being different; the insistence on dwelling on the past is exactly what they were railing against.

In that moment, La La Land begins offering something much deeper than its shimmering surface, because L.A. itself is the same way.  As Sebastian says, people in L.A. "worship everything but value nothing."  La La Land observes that maybe that dismissiveness isn't true.  Maybe it's like jazz itself, by mixing old and new, by looping back in on itself over and over and then finding its own way forward, by both revering the past and pushing forward into the future, and in that way is more than it appears to be.

The movie is the same.  It is in love with the same dream as everyone who starts out in the movie business -- it upholds the false vision that all movies are made in soundstages, that all movie stars are glamorous, that the skies in L.A. are always bathed in a Technicolor light.  It knows the truth, and it is well aware of what that truth means -- but it's happy nonetheless.

That makes it perfect for this moment, when we have seen so much unhappiness and ugliness that we don't know what to do anymore.  La La Land knows exactly what to do: Sing and dance.



Viewed Dec. 11, 2016 -- ArcLight Hollywood

1100

"Office Christmas Party"

 1.5 / 5  

May Santa strike me down if I'm lying, but I promise I arrived to Office Christmas in a jovial mood, ready to have a good time.  So, you may hereby consider me a Scrooge.

By the end of the movie, I was the sour-faced guy who comes in at one minute past midnight, turns on all the lights, unplugs the speakers and shouts, "Go home!"  If being that guy prevents you from seeing Office Christmas Party, I can live with that.

I wanted to like it, I was reay to like it, I even laughed in the first few minutes -- I laughed multiple times, and loudly.  But Office Christmas Party is a movie made for people who think the skits on "Saturday Night Live" need to go on a lot longer and be more uncomfortable.  It's a one-joke idea that would barely withstand the stress of being stretched to seven minutes.  Imagine what 105 minutes will do.

Office Christmas Party tries to be another in the series of Grownups Behaving Badly movies that started with The Hangover and Bridesmaids and lately has included Bad Moms and Sisters.  Those were funny movies.  This isn't.

Nothing could put me more in the Christmas spirit than to say that Office Christmas Party is more than a lump of coal at the bottom of a dingy stocking.  There's something really wrong when Jason Bateman, T.J. Miller, Kate McKinnon, Rob Corddry and Olivia Munn cannot, individually or collectively, earn more than a couple of chuckles.  And let me make this clear: There are a couple of chuckles in Office Christmas Party.  A couple.

There are also a lot of really dull moments, as the movie labors to find a story on which to hinge the zaniness, and ends up with a rather bizarre one, about a company that makes, of all things, Internet servers and computer storage (I.T. people may well tell me they are the same thing, I don't know, and I didn't care too much before the movie and don't care afterward, no matter how much the word "server" has been in the news recently).  They've lost a lot of business, but they're really nice people.  The woman who runs the company is really not nice.  She's played by Jennifer Aniston, continuing a very ill-advised career move to play "against type" and be mean and spiteful, as if to prove the remarkably sexist view that beautiful women have something wrong with them.  She comes into town spitting venom and pulling a carry-on suitcase to tell the company that she's going to fire 40% of the employees.  She also tells them they can't have their office Christmas party.  That's what the name of the film refers to, in case you needed clarification.

The bosses, played by Miller and Bateman, plead with her not to be so mean.  In a last-ditch effort to save the company, they decide to have a really, really, really, really, really, really big office Christmas party and invite a big potential client (Courtney B. Vance, also mostly unfunny).

One of the office workers is a dweeby Indian guy (no racial stereotypes here) who wants to impress his friends by having a really hot girlfriend, so he hires a prostitute (no sexual stereotypes here), and there's a subplot about the prostitute and her crazy pimp (who is -- funny, right?! -- a woman).  It's a desperate subplot in a desperate movie.

Throughout it all, there is a harried, repressed HR woman, played by McKinnon, who gets the laughs because she's so backward and naive and she wears her hair like a helmet and dresses appropriately in the office while chastising one of the workers who is showing cleavage.

The office Christmas party gets out of hand.  Grown people swing from the rafters and drink too much and do drugs and try very hard to act silly.  They come across as childish and stupid.  Grown people, even those who have been imbibing, don't act like this.  In real life, it comes across as sad, pathetic behavior, but on screen it's just wasting time.

Which isn't to say, I feel a strange obligation to repeat, that there aren't laughs.  They are rare, they are strained, and maybe the biggest one comes when Jennifer Aniston looks directly at a little girl and says, angrily and bitterly, "F--- you."  That's funny, right?

Ho ho ho.



Viewed Dec. 6, 2016 -- Arclight Hollywood

1930

"Manchester by the Sea"

 4.5 / 5  

Kenneth Lonergan's quietly heartbreaking movie Manchester by the Sea is bookended with shots of the ocean, of fishing boats and a quiet coastal village a few dozen miles north of Boston.

It's the sort of place we romanticize: "Let's live there when we retire."  So picturesque, so quaint, so American with its colonial architecture and slightly ramshackle, fishing-boat appearance.  We pass through and talk to the locals and imagine their lives, smiling along the way.  They have their losses, though, every one of them.

Manchester by the Sea shows us a man who appears to be not much more or less than average: Lee Chandler, a guy who never went to college, who's much better looking than he knows and capable of much more than being an apartment-building janitor who unclogs excrement-filled toilets of single women who quietly lust after him.  He's oblivious to the menial work and to the sultry looks; he's oblivious, really, to life.

When Manchester by the Sea opens, Lee gets the sort of phone call that always happens when we're in the middle of something else, that takes us by such surprise that we don't, as movies so frequently depict, break down in tears or devolve into a wailing mass of emotion -- we respond to these sort of calls the way Lee does: We listen to the information, we figure out what we need to do next, we do it. These are the sort of phone calls that place us on auto-pilot.

In Lee's case, the call is from a hospital in a town between Boston and Lee's hometown of Manchester by the Sea.  Lee's brother, Joe, has died suddenly.  Joe's best friend, George, tries to explain but can't -- there they were, looking at boats, and Joe just sort of fell down.  George thought he was joking.  He couldn't believe it could happen so fast.

Lee knows how fast things happen, and not just because Joe's 16-year-old son, Patrick, becomes Lee's instant responsibility.  There's much more going on in Manchester by the Sea, which the film takes some time to reveal.  Lee and Patrick both have their worlds shaken, but in one long, stunning, near-wordless scene -- gripping and beautiful in its form, shocking in its content, all set to the bombastic strains of Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor -- Lonergan's impeccably crafted screenplay reveals the horrific depths of Lee's grief.  Joe's unexpected death is downright manageable in light of what Lee has experienced with his ex-wife Randi.

So impossible was the scenario he faced some years ago that retreating to the safe anonymity of Boston made the most emotional sense -- minimum wage and toilet plungers can be something of a relief.

And yet, now Lee is faced with yet another life-changing event he didn't want: Joe has appointed him legal guardian over the strong-willed, bright, perpetually horny Patrick.  Who knows how long it's been since they saw each other?  Maybe not since Patrick was a little boy and his mother finally had one too many alcohol-driven blackouts, which finally proved too much for Joe.

Whatever the case, it doesn't matter, which is part of the point that Manchester by the Sea is making: It's irrelevant whether we're close or distant, whether we're blood or friends -- we're tied to the people who have, for better or rose, made us.  We can't escape them.  "The past is never dead," Faulkner wrote, "it isn't even past."

We can't escape the people, we can't escape the events, we can't escape the little successes and the minor failings, the silly mistakes and the profound ones.  They're all who we are.  But some of us deal with that better than others, and Manchester by the Sea's real brilliance is in how it takes a character who resists conventional notions of healing and moving on, but who has to keep plowing forward all the same.

Casey Affleck plays Lee with such understated anger and simmering hostility that it's both a shock and a cathartic relief the couple of times he hauls off and punches people in the movie.  He needs to do something.  Patrick, played by a genuinely revelatory actor named Lucas Hedges, doesn't struggle with the transition between his father and Lee.  He doesn't like his father's death, but he knows he can't do anything about it -- his sensibility, which is combined with a deep and affecting emotional fragility, is very much at the core of Manchester by the Sea.

The movie becomes, for a while, a sort of battle of wills between these two, a touching and honest look at what it would be like for a middle-aged man to suddenly have to take on the responsibility of a 16-year-old old boy.

But then there is the other thing -- the thing that Manchester by the Sea wisely keeps a secret for quite a while, the thing that turned Lee into the kind of guy who will randomly punch people.  Patrick knows about it.  Everyone in town knows about it, and that includes Lee's former wife Randi (Michelle Williams), who he sees from time to time.  The incident is rarely discussed, but weighs on the rest of the film as it weighs on Lee's life.

As he struggles with his new responsibilities and his failure at breaking free from the past, he forms a deep connection with Patrick, but the film never stoops to the simplicity of giving them all a pat ending.  There are no endings in Manchester by the Sea, not for anyone -- toward the end of the movie, an old man tells Lee the story of how the man's father took off on a tuna boat one day in 1958 and never came back.  No one knows what happened.

There is no trace of self-pity in the story; it is not maudlin.  It just is.  One day, Lee may be able to tell his own story that way: It just happened.  But not yet.  The same goes for Patrick and Randi and everyone else affected by these enormous tragedies that, Manchester by the Sea at least hints, aren't really all that enormous, but no less powerful for being quotidian.  They are all around us if we just notice them, and they will happen, in one way or another, to all of us.  Every closed door has its own story to tell.

When they happen, we may be, for a time -- maybe forever -- as beaten down and hopeless as Lee. Or we might be as youthfully optimistic as Patrick.  Or as helpful and stalwart as George.  But somehow, likely with the help of others -- and sometimes despite their best intentions -- we'll get through it.  That's what we do.

That's why the tides keep going in and coming out.  Why the seagulls flock.  Why the snow falls.  It happens.  We can't stop it from happening.

And so it goes.

In that beauty, that rhythm, that quiet assurance that even if we're not at all "OK," we really are all going to be all right in the end, Manchester by the Sea achieves a beauty that is both visual (how could it not be with this setting) and emotional.  It's as honest, as deep, as thoughtful an examination of grief, loss and pain as you'll ever see.  It's tempting to call Manchester by the Sea a working-class Ordinary People, but it's very different than that upper-class study of polite behavior in the midst of chaos, though it shares many of the same observations: hopeful ones in the midst of the sorrow, and sorrowful ones in the midst of loveliness.

Manchester by the Sea doesn't want to try to find answers, because they are as elusive as the cold wind that buffet the coast.  The winds will never stop, nor will the grief -- but they will quiet down from time to time, and it's then that we can see there's still something beautiful all around us.



Viewed Dec. 1, 2016 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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