Kailey and Dan review Pitch Perfect 2 plus documentaries That Sugar Film, Cobain: Montage of Heck and The Ground We Won. Kailey also reveals the first titles in this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
When did “late-period: Woody Allen start? Was it with Match Point (when he finally left New York for some new scenery)? Or should we consider these last ten, globe-trotting, years as late‑r Woody? The last ten years have certainly been up and down in terms of quality. Scoop was all-but diabolical. Vicky Cristina Barcelona was robust and surprising. Midnight in Paris was genial but disposable (despite being a massive hit) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger was barely even a film.
Now, Blue Jasmine, in which Mr. Allen uses the notorious Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi crimes as inspiration for a story about the fraud’s victims as well as the collateral damage inflicted on a woman oblivious of her own complicity. As the eponymous Jasmine, Cate Blanchett plays the wife of Alec Baldwin’s shonky NY businessman, their relationship told in flashback while she tries to rebuild her life in her adopted half-sister’s (or something – the relationship seems unnecessarily complicated for something that has no material impact on the story) apartment in an unfashionable area of San Francisco.
In Hope Springs, Meryl Streep proves once again that not only can she play any woman, she can also play everywoman. She’s Kay, an unfulfilled Nebraska housewife, married for 31 years to accountant Tommy Lee Jones and resigned to sleeping in separate bedrooms and cooking him his eggs every morning while he reads the paper. Except, she’s not resigned, she’s become determined. Determined to prove that marriage doesn’t just fizzle out after the kids leave home, that the past doesn’t have to equal the future.
So, she signs them both up for “intensive couples counselling” with friendly therapist Steve Carell, in picturesque seaside Maine. Jones is gruffly resistant, of course, and it’s his deadpan sarcasm that prompts nost of the early comedy (their fumbling attempts to spice up their life provides the rest). As a comedy, Hope Springs is extremely gentle – much more gentle than the trailer would have you believe – but that gentleness suits the delicate subject and the script (by Vanessa Taylor) actually burrows in pretty deeply to a subject that, I’m sure, is pretty close to home for lots of viewers.
After watching so many films that are so similar in content and construction that they are hard to tell apart, it is a real pleasure to come across something that contains no familiar faces, has a director whose name is unknown (to me at least) and takes an approach to storytelling that consistently surprises and delights – even if the story itself is about as dark as it gets.
Lee Daniels’ Precious, I’m pleased to gaboureport, is far more than just novelty, rising confidently (cinematically) above its kitchen-sink foundations to soar high above almost every drama I saw last year. Set in Harlem in the mid 1980s, it presents us with the unpromising figure of Clareece Precious Jones (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe). She is 16 years old and overweight, abused at home and ignored at school, dreaming of something better but not hopeful of a way out. Her father has just made her pregnant for the second time and when the school finds out she is given the option of welfare (which sustains her grotesquely awful mother) or a special school for those with potential gifts – she has some talent for maths.
