Bob's Cinema Diary: 8/25/19 -- Jay Myself and After the Wedding

Jay Myself

Jay Maisel, now 88, has earned his reputation as of the great photographers of his time. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Maisel refused to confine himself either to commercial projects or the art world. He made an impact on both. Maisel spent most of his career living and working in a former bank building in Manhattan's Bowery, an area that since has gone upscale. Maisel bought the building with a $25,000 downpayment he earned photographing for Life magazine. When the cost of keeping his building in a gentrifying neighborhood rose to unaffordable levels, Maisel was forced to sell. Don't feel too sorry for Maisel, though. The price he got for his building: $55 million. But moving meant paying other prices, as well. After 49 years, Maisel must have felt that he was not only moving out of his studio but out of his life. At the building others called "the bank,'' he kept ("hoarded") might be the better word, a vast array of collections, many of which he used in his work. Director Stephen Wilkes, himself a photographer and an admirer of Maisel's photographs, talks with Maisel, who proves to be unsurprisingly complex: funny, grumpy, irascible and, most important, terrifically astute when discussing imagery and color. Maisel had to discard much to move into smaller digs and part of the movie's power is the sheer wonder it generates at the amount of stuff Maisel accumulated. Wilkes includes ample examples of Maisel's work, which serve as powerful reminders of why we want to spend time watching and listening to a man who claims that he doesn't take photographs. Photographs take him, he says.

After the Wedding

Director Bart Freundlich remakes Danish director Susanne Bier's 2007 drama with a fine cast and gender swaps in key roles. Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore and Billy Crudup headline a production that, despite what appear to be serious intentions, winds up feeling contrived and sudsy. The story begins in earnest when Isabel (Williams) returns to the US from India. She needs to secure funding for a school for orphans that she helps run. As it turns out, the head of a large media company (Moore) has heard about the school and wants to make a major contribution. To complicate matters, Isabel arrives in the middle of the week when Moore's Theresa is distracted by the wedding she's planned for her daughter (Abby Quinn). Theresa stalls on the donation, insisting that Isabel attend the wedding. If you're familiar with the original -- and even if you aren't -- you'll have little trouble anticipating a few of the plot twists Freundlich engineers. Freundlich's straight-on approach to material that sometimes borders on farce doesn't work consistently, even though Williams' low-key performance plays well against the brisk insensitivity Moore brings to her character. Secrets are revealed and the characters react to them, but a drama that's trying for maturity squanders an opportunity to deal with things movies too often neglect: the weight of difficult pasts and how people choose to carry it.

'Bernadette': flat where it should be sharp

Cate Blanchette plays a deeply depressed woman who's losing it in Seattle.

Bernadette lives in a large Seattle house that seems to be falling apart around her, although trace elements of a re-design can be seen. A sparsely furnished modern-looking bedroom, for example. Bernadette's husband works for Microsoft and has become a Ted-talking star in the world of high tech. Her whip-smart daughter is bound for Choate, a prep school that very likely will ensure her a place on the success track. Bernadette spends much of her time talking to Manjula, a Seri-like digital assistant in India.

Of course, she’s miserable.

Such is the life of Bernadette (Cate Blanchett), the title character of Where’d You Go Bernadette, director Richard Linklater’s adaptation of a well-received 2012 novel by Maria Semple.

Smart, judgmental and misanthropic, Bernadette can be a pain in the butt, and her contempt for what she calls “life’s banalities” doesn't seem to have led her toward anything resembling a cultural high ground. After years of ignoring her strange behavior, Bernadette's husband (Billy Crudup) has decided his wife needs help.

I can’t say I believed any of this because Linklater's movie can’t find a way successfully to blend satiric observation and character study while also giving his movie a bit emotional heft. As social satire, the movie takes hit-and-miss swipes at middle-class parents, over-achieving kids, annoyingly progressive schools and Seattle's tech-crazed world.

Even Kristen Wiig, as a neighbor and nemesis of Bernadette, isn't able to break through; she's playing a character who's so steeped in her "liberal" values that she's turned her life into a form of parody.

Bernadette's daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) narrates a story that gradually lets us know why Bernadette has lost her grip. She was once a star architect who won a MacArthur Grant for her genius. She designed houses that others envied, but after one of her vaunted projects met a tragic end, she vanished from the Los Angeles scene. She and her husband moved to Seattle, a city she says she hates.

Bee announces that she wants her parents to take her to Antarctica as a reward for something or other. Bernadette reluctantly agrees, even though the trip means she won't be able to avoid the horror of mingling with other passengers on a cruise ship.

Linklater's best movies are conversational gems that catch moods and moments, movies such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. He's also made observant comedies, as those of us who enjoyed Bernie and School of Rock can attest. Boyhood may have been Linklater's best and most deeply felt movie.

Here, Linklater's working in a commercial vein while trying to retain the sharp idiosyncrasies of Semple's novel. The movie's most outrageous moment arrives in the form of a mudslide that disrupts a fund-raising party at the home of Wiig's character. It lands with a thud.

There's one very nice scene in which Bernadette encounters a former colleague (Laurence Fishburne) from Los Angeles. She regales him with a dizzying monologue about what she's been doing for the last 20 years. It's one of the few times Blanchett's amped-up theatricality proves revealing.

By the end, Bernadette starts delivering on-the-nose dialogue, offering its message in a form that comes close to bromide. Someone as creative as Bernadette must create or she'll go nuts. She'll become a menace to others. She's not cut out for ordinary suburban life.

Well, I thought, who really is? And, as I said, I didn't feel as if Linklater made me believe in Bernadette or her vast array of problems.

Ridley Scott again unleashes monsters

The creator of the original Alien delivers an accomplished helping of sci-fi and horror -- but some of the thrill is gone.

Everyone who's old enough, probably remembers their first viewing of Alien , the Ridley Scott-directed movie that in 1979 landed a direct hit to the pit of the stomach. Besides being a masterclass exercise in generating tension, Alien also helped temper the optimistic buoyancy of movies such as 1977's Close Encounters of a Third Kind. Scott brought cynicism and dread to the galaxy, offering a view of space that was industrialized, gritty and full of terrifying dangers.

James Cameron's Aliens added booming urgency and scale to the groundwork Scott had done. And, of course, there were two additional movies, neither of which found quite the same purchase in the pop-cultural landscape or should we say "spacescape?"

Scott again picks up his creature cudgels with Alien: Covenant, a sequel to his 2012 Prometheus, as well as a prequel to Alien.

In Prometheus, Scott played with big ideas and made his most memorable character an android played by Michael Fassbender, who gave his synthetic creation traces of scalding wit. Unfortunately, the serious talk in Prometheus sometimes clashed with the action Scott may have felt compelled to deliver.

Set in 2104, Alien: Covenant isn't exactly free of ideas, either. They're laid out in the movie's chilly opening -- a conversation between an android (Fassbender) and his maker (Guy Pearce). The two discuss the nature of creation and the ability of a creation to surpass its creator. The android sounds an eerie note that suggests the inherent inferiority of human life. "You will die. I will not,'' says the robot.

Little in Scott's movie matches the ominous elegance of this prolog which takes place in a large white room that looks as if it might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

But ideas eventually fall prey to the expected shocks in which newly designed horrific looking creatures burst from backs or chests or latch onto the faces of their victims.

The story involves a space ship named Covenant, which is being run by an android named David. The crew has been put into deep-space sleep as the ship heads toward a distant planet with some 20,000 colonists on board. The implication: Humans must leave a fully exploited Earth.

The plan goes awry when a space storm awakens the crew, which almost immediately faces a temptation that we know will lead to trouble. A signal -- John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads -- emanates from a planet that's closer than the ship's original destination. Could years be shaved from the Covenant's planned seven-year journey by finding a closer and apparently habitable planet?

Katherine Waterston plays a crew member who loses her husband, the ship's captain, during the sudden reawakening. Another officer (Billy Crudup) assumes command of the small crew, which includes Danny McBride, Demian Bichir and Carmen Ejogo.

It gives you some idea about the effort that goes into characterization to know that McBride's character is called Tennessee. He wears a cowboy hat. Do you need (or want) to know anything more?

Nowhere near as memorable as the original Alien crew, this group of voyagers winds up buffeted by a conflict between Waterston's evidence-based character and a man more inclined to take things on faith (Crudup).

Additional conflict arises between two robots, both ably played by Fassbender: the android of the prologue -- named David -- and a later model named Walter. David proves the more mission-oriented to the two. Having absorbed what he needs from humankind, the sinister Walter sees no reason for keeping people around.

Scott spends significant amounts of time on the planet that the Covenant reaches, thus sacrificing the extreme claustrophobia that turned the first movie into a white-knuckle masterpiece.

Not surprisingly, the movie's peripherals are all expertly handled by the veteran Scott and his crew: from the look of the spacecraft to the idyllic surface of a planet where the crew encounters monsters capable of working their way into human bodies in a variety of ways.

Alien: Covenant arrives wrapped in a convincing package. For some, that will be enough, but for those who regard the original Alien as a breakthrough movie, it's difficult not to see Alien: Covenant as a slightly depleted helping of a once stunning pop-cultural landmark, something like a well-made TV series that continues to entertain even after it has lost much of its juice.

The Catholic Church meets the press

A compelling look at how the Boston Globe uncovered a scandal..

As the nation lumbers toward another major election, you can be sure that some of the candidates will be taking aim at the media. Many already have.

Tiresome as they may be, these inevitable anti-media rants make Spotlight -- a terrific movie about how the Boston Globe's investigative team uncovered sexual abuses by priests in Boston's archdiocese -- a must-see reminder that journalists can (and often do) make important contributions to the betterment of their communities.

Director Tom McCarthy builds his story around the Globe's Spotlight team, a quartet of reporters who were given time to develop and report stories that required deep digging.

Michael Keaton, who played a newspaper editor in Ron Howard's sometimes overlooked The Paper, returns to the ranks of ink-stained wretches as Walter "Robby" Robinson, the head of the Spotlight team.

The story of pedophile priests didn't really take hold until the Globe got a new editor in 2001. Marty Baron -- played in a masterfully collected performance by Liev Schreiber -- was a Jewish newcomer to Boston. Baron, who's now editor of the Washington Post, thought that the Globe had a responsibility to look at the failings of one of the city's most revered institutions.

McCarthy (Win Win, The Visitor, and The Station Agent) keeps a complicated story on track in ways that sustain interest even though we already know the outcome of this unseemly tale.

In a way that works for the story, Spotlight doesn't really have a main character. It's about individual commitment within a context of team work, a much-needed tribute to role players. There are no star turns in Spotlight; the movie that celebrates journeyman work on every level.

The Spotlight team is ably represented by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian D'Arcy.

Ruffalo portrays Michael Rezendes, an avid, monkish reporter who eventually won the confidence of Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer who represented victims of church abuse. Initially mistrustful of the Globe, Garabedian had spent years trying to interest the paper in what he saw as wide-scale criminality within the church.

McAdams plays Sacha Pfeiffer; she's committed to the story but understands that it will shatter the church-centered world in which her grandmother -- like many Catholic Bostonians -- lives. Catholics made up 53 percent of the Globe's readership.

D'Arcy portrays James Matt Carroll. While working on the story, Carroll discovers that his own home isn't located far from a house where pedophile priests were hidden so that they could be "rehabilitated."

Billy Crudup portrays a lawyer who knows how to keep the lid on things by making settlements with victims; and Jamey Sheridan has a nice turn as a church attorney who wants to avoid scandal for what he deems a greater good: maintaining the order of things.

Len Cariou portrays Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the church official who eventually was accused of covering up sexual abuses of priests in his archdiocese.

I don't normally like reviews that turn into lists of actors, but it's impossible not to acknowledge all of those who contributed to a fine ensemble cast, including John Slattery, who plays Ben Bradlee Jr., the editor who functions as Robinson's boss.

Spotlight's reach extends beyond the way journalists handle a complicated story, although it certainly shows the required grunt work. It's also about the way a community constructs a protective veneer around its valued institutions and how easy it is for lifelong members of that community to accept such facades as necessary and immutable.

McCarthy doesn't neglect the toll that the investigation takes on the journalists who are conducting it. Keaton, better and much less showy than he was in Birdman, wrestles with the conflicts generated by his varying identities and loyalties: journalist, Catholic and Bostonian.

We meet victims of priests who are conflicted about telling their story, sometimes because they've tried before and were met with indifference. We meet Boston bigwigs; and see what happens when a Cardinal tries to charm a newspaper editor who's not impressed by charm.

Spotlight bravely keeps its eye on truths that don't always make the Globe look good: The paper, we learn, had enough information to have begun reporting the story 20 years before it actually turned to the task.

Credit Spotlight for not imbuing its hardworking journalists with phony nobility, for not sensationalizing a tawdry story and for reminding us that journalists do more than, as some would have you believe, employ cheap tricks to play "gotcha" with politicians.

When students become prisoners

Re-living a brutal experiment at Stanford University

If you're looking for a drama that demonstrates the alarming malleability of human nature, you may want to try The Stanford Prison Experiment, a tightly wound look at a real-life experiment that took place at Stanford University in 1971. Twenty-four students volunteered to play prisoners and guards, roles that were arbitrarily assigned. Billy Crudup plays Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who concocts the experiment. He believes that his foray into how men behave under pressure ultimately will benefit society. A capable group of young actors portray the guards and prisoners. Working from a screenplay by Tim Talbott, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez ably puts the story through its psychologically brutal paces. The point: People will rise (or in this case "sink") to their assigned roles in any relationship based on unequal power. The screenplay raises the right ethical questions, although it's clear from the outset that the experiment qualifies as a questionable endeavor. Long before the experiment reaches its abrupt conclusion, you may find yourself wondering whether you're looking at science or sadism.

Moves on the art-house circuit

CHICO & RITA TAKES AIM AT ADULTS

Chico & Rita. Directors Fernando Trueba and artist Javier Mariscal take a lingering, discursive look at the bumpy love affair between a jazz pianist and a singer in this Oscar-nominated animated feature. The movie begins with the pianist -- old and wandering through the mists of memory -- thinking about how he met Rita in Havana during the jazzy latter days of Batista's regime. The story takes Chico and Rita from Havana to New York, Paris and Las Vegas as they try to sustain musical careers and fan the flames of an affair that meets with its share of obstacles, some of them caused by Chico's roving eye. The movie's music takes precedence over the animation, which tends to flatten out faces, and an improbable ending puts a smiley face on a sometimes edgy story. Still, the main virtue of Chico & Rita is that it's aimed entirely at adults, which means it makes room for Rita's voluptuous carnality and includes an animated sex scene. I don't take this as a sign that adult-oriented animation has a real future, but one always can hope.

NORWEGIAN WOOD, IT'S NOT ALWAYS SO GOOD

As a lover of director Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya, I found myself hoping I'd be equally transported by Norwegian Wood, Tran's big-screen adaptation of a popular 1987 Japanese novel by Haruki Murakami. Tran serves up some of the year's best and most memorable imagery, but tells a story that's never fully involving. The tale springs from the suicide in the 1960s of an adolescent whose death haunts the lives of two friends. Watanabe (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) leaves his village home to become a college student in Tokyo, but remains detached from the student turmoil that surrounds him. Eventually, Watanabe re-connects with the beautiful Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), who was the girlfriend of the boy who killed himself. Watanabe and Naoka establish a relationship, but she ultimately winds up languishing in a mental institution, tormented by the unfulfilled sexual relationship she had with the boy who committed suicide. Another student (Kiko Mizuhara) -- the sexually aggressive Midori -- also establishes a relationship with Wantanabe. The elements of a fine movie are in place, but Norwegian Wood misses the mark, something in the manner of an arrow that hits the target and falls gently to the ground. Notable, though, are the brilliant work of cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin and the musical score of Jonny Greenwood.

WAIT, HAVEN'T WE BEEB DOWN THIS ROAD BEFORE?

It's not possible for me totally to resist a performance by Alan Arkin, so I was happy enough watching Thin Ice, a bit of neo-noir set during the middle of winter in Wisconsin, where (as one character) puts it, there are two seasons: winter and road work. Director Jill Sprecher tells the story of an unscrupulous insurance agent (Greg Kinnear) who's trying to persuade a aging and somewhat addled client (Arkin) to give him a valuable violin. Of course, Arkin's Gorvy, who lives in a house strewn with bric-a-brac and clutter, doesn't know the instrument has any real value, at least not at first. The plot thickens appropriately as Sprecher makes room for appearances by Bob Balaban (as an appraiser of violins), David Harbour (as an ultra-sincere insurance agent who works for Kinnear's Micky), and Billy Crudup (as a workman who installs security alarms). Crudup gives a strange and lively performance as a man who becomes mired in criminal activity, and Kinnear does his best to hold the story together as an increasingly desperate man. The trouble with Thin Ice: If you've seen enough of these neo-noir, con-game stories, you'll peep the movie's hole card long before you should. This is not a case where familiarity breeds contempt, but it sure as hell takes off some of the edge.

Jula Roberts eats, prays and learns to love

It's hardly news that Julia Roberts can carry a movie. So you won't be shocked that she puts Eat, Pray, Love on her back, pretty much keeping this episodic adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir from falling apart. Appealing as she is, Roberts can't elevate this travelogue into something meaningful and deep. I don't blame her, but director Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck fame seems to have forgotten that a long-standing internal conflict about life's meaning only can carry a movie so far. As was the case with Gilbert's book, the movie follows Gilbert as she leaves two failed relationships and tries to find herself during a yearlong trip that begins in Italy, continues in India and culminates in Bali. On her various stops, Gilbert learns life lessons, and eventually arrives at a point at which she can take a chance on love. The men in Gilbert's life are played by Billy Crudup (first husband); James Franco (Gilbert's next love); and Javier Bardem (the man who just might be able to persuade Gilbert to risk her heart.) Richard Jenkins portrays a Texan Gilbert meets in an Indian ashram; Jenkins is good, but the movie doesn't really allow any of these characters to flourish. They're like people we meet on a trip, feel a little close to and then forget. Roberts and supporting players do their best to give the movie some easy charm. I enjoyed looking at Rome, and reveled the airy openness of Gilbert's home in Bali, but Eat, Pray, Love offers a cliched view of the world and of its colorful characters, a smiling, toothless medicine man included. I couldn't watch Eat, Pray, Love without thinking how much more I wanted from these characters and from the movie itself. Director Murphy, one of the screenplay's co-writers, attempts to replicate the author's voice by having Roberts supply a narration. But if there's any authentic yearning in the movie, I didn't feel it. I also couldn't help thinking that if Arthur Frommer wrote self-help books instead of travel guides, this is how they'd look.