Genres collide in ‘Spin Me Round’

 

As the manager of an Italian restaurant that's part of a ubiquitous chain, Alison Brie's Amber thinks she's had a stroke of luck. Dutiful and loyal, Amber learns that she's been selected to attend a corporate retreat in Tuscany. Amber is supposed to stay at a villa owned by the head of the Tuscan Grove chain (Alessandro Nivola) that employs her. As it turns out, Amber and a variety of other managers are housed in a bare-bones hotel near the boss's extravagant villa. Their supposed immersion in Italian culture proves superficial and it soon becomes clear that Spin Me Round wants to shade its comedy with thriller elements. Hidden "romantic" agendas arise, particularly after Nivola's Nick invites Amber to join him on his beautiful yacht. Among the cast. Molly Shannon stands out as a woman with anger-management problems. Aubrey Plaza, always intriguing, plays Nick's no-nonsense assistant, a woman with a libidinous plan of her own. Zach Woods portrays Dana, a guy who buys into the chain's propaganda, at least for a while. Director Jeff Baena, who wrote the screenplay with Brie, tries to blend rom-com and thriller flavors, but the story's mystery seems clear to everyone except the folks in the movie. After generating a few laughs and threatening to ride a pleasant Tuscan vibe, Spin Me Around sounds vaguely ominous notes that don't swell into anything rich or exciting. And, oh yeah, the comedy doesn't always spark, either.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 4/24/19 -- Wild Nights with Emily, Peterloo and Sunset

Some weeks, the number of movies challenges even those of us who tend to review as much as possible. This is one of those weeks. As a result, I'm trying something a bit different; i.e., I'm going to write about as much as possible in the most efficient way. If it works, you may see this approach again. I'm calling it a "diary" even though it reflects nothing about my life -- other than the fact that much of it has been measured in movies. Make what you will of that.

Wild Nigh Nights with Emily

The movie, A Quiet Passion (2017), took us inside the isolated life of poet Emily Dickinson. Cynthia Nixon led director Terrence Davies' somber look at a poet who could be preoccupied with mortality. It's not easy, after all, to be upbeat about a poet who wrote this line: "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain." Those familiar with Dickinson's work may be a bit shocked to find that Wild Nights with Emily, which casts Molly Shannon as the poet, sheds the shroud of gloom that usually accompanies talk of Dickinson. Shannon portrays a poet who carried on an enduring lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler). Don't fret about Dickinson's brother Austin (Kevin Seal); he busies himself with an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (Amy Seimetz), the woman whose lecture about Dickinson's life and poetry frames the story. The movie traces the relationship between Amy and Susan back through their teen years, and director Madeleine Olnek often takes a frolicking approach without dismissing the seriousness of Dickinson's work. The movie doesn't short change the difficulties Dickinson had finding acceptance as a woman poet in the 19th century but approaches much of the story with a sly understanding of the absurd propriety that keeps everyone from acknowledging the obvious. Shannon and Ziegler make what initially seems an unlikely approach (fiction based on reasonable speculation) into something that challenges Dickinson's image, cracking the ice of literary reverence to find a real person. At one point, Dickinson writes a poem on the back of a sheet of paper containing one of her recipes. She supplies some of the local Amherst kids with gingerbread that she lowers in a basket from her bedroom window and, thanks to Shannon, has an expression that punctures pretension. I have no idea how Dickinson purists will react to the movie, but it made me feel better about a poet who seemed to live with an eye on the grave. If it's wishful thinking, then consider it a good example of such license: In Wild Nights with Emily, we meet a Dickinson who seems to defy convention without guilt, particularly when it comes to tasting the pleasures of love, sex, and emotional intimacy.

PETERLOO

A bit of background for those of us who aren't particularly well-versed in English history. In 1819, the British cavalry spent three hours stomping through a crowd of as many as 80,000 protesters in St Peter's Field, Manchester. The protesters were demanding that parliamentary representation that reflected a one-man-one-vote approach. (It would be nearly a century before women in Britain won the right to vote.) It pains me to say that director Mike Leigh, whose work I take seriously, has turned a potentially volatile story into a series of illustrated position papers that expose all sides of the disputes leading up what became known as the Peterloo Massacre. Heavy on mise-en-scene, Peterloo devolves into a series of meetings that make it seem as if the movie's real subject is oratory. Suffice to say that none of the movie's various politicians could survive the age of Twitter. The movie clearly expresses its main conflict: The elite want to keep the discontented masses at bay, and those same masses want to be heard. The oppressed consist of those who work the mills of Manchester, eking out a living and trying to cling to their dignity. Leigh's approach requires him to introduce a large number of characters, many defined almost entirely by their political stances and by whatever flavor the actors are able to bring to the enterprise. Leigh clearly sides with the downtrodden, beginning his movie by following a young bugler (David Moorst) who returns to Manchester in a near daze after the Battle of Waterloo. The movie builds toward the fated demonstration at which the great orator Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear) has been scheduled to address the crowd. At times, Leigh creates the illusion that events almost are unfolding in real time. But there's hardly a shot or scene that doesn't overstay its welcome, and Leigh winds up with a movie in which honorable intentions aren't quite enough to stave off the feeling that we're undergoing a bit of an endurance test.

SUNSET

I was not among those who found Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes' Holocaust drama Son of Saul (2015) as stunning as many other critics. That film, Laszlo's first, won an Oscar for best foreign-language film. I suppose, then, that I shouldn't have been surprised that Laszlo's second outing -- Sunset -- proves even less successful. Over-using his signature camera move -- he follows characters into scenes in a way that disorients the viewer -- Nemes takes us to Budapest on the eve of World War I. The movie focuses on Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), a young woman who arrives in Budapest from Trieste. She hopes to find employment at a renowned millinery shop. It doesn't take long to learn that Irisz is the daughter of the shop's former owners, a couple who were killed in a fire that ravaged the store. The meticulous Oszkar Brill (Vlad Ivanov) has rebuilt the business. He has no wish to hire anyone from the family of its previous owners. Irisz, who was sent to an orphanage at the age of two, also learns that she had an apparently wayward brother who murdered the husband of a countess (Julia Jakubowska). A variety of characters keep warning Iresz to leave town; she keeps ignoring their advice. Pressing on as she tries to locate her brother, Irisz begins to learn dreadful secrets about the hidden agenda behind the hat business. Confusing and ultimately unsatisfying, Sunset adheres to the rules of slow disclosure as if they were holy writ; but, in this case, the gradual revelation of information not only keeps the audience from getting ahead of the story but creates considerable frustration. In Sunset, slow disclosure comes perilously close to no disclosure at all. Sunset constantly flirts with larger meanings, but no deluge of insight arrives to quench the thirst for a comprehensible resolution.

They want to have a baby

Director Tamara Jenkins returns to the screen with Private Life; Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn make the trip worthwhile.

In Private Life, Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn play a married couple who have spent years trying to have a baby. As a couple in their 40s, they're facing a difficult reality; their lives are beginning to lose all traces of youthful promise.

Clever, smart and entertaining, Private Life provides the perfect vehicle for director Tamara Jenkins to return to the screen after more than a decade. Jenkins' The Savages (2007) featured Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings trying to cope with a demented father.

In this outing, Jenkins turns her attention to a frustrated New York couple we get to know well, and who are so life-sized you feel as if they might live next door, providing you live in New York’s East Village.

After so much failure, it seems logical to wonder why Hahn's Rachel and Giamatti's Richard want to bring a child into their lives. The answer, as I’ve suggested, may lie in the fact that they're an attractive couple who seem to have reached their career limits.

The theater company Richard runs isn't going to make him rich or famous. Neither is the pickle company he operates to keep bread and butter on the table. Rachel's trips to Yaddo, a prestigious artists' colony, haven't pushed her to the top of the literary world. Richard and Rachel still live in a cramped apartment where the upstairs neighbor plays music that booms through the floorboards.

A child might mark Rachel and Richard's last way to leave something tangible behind but their lives have degenerated into a series of injections (administered by him), ovulation-cycle watching and visits to specialists. And, yes, Richard and Rachel also are in the process of trying to a adopt.

Striving for pregnancy has begun to look like penance for undisclosed sins or, at very least, a full-time job.

The movie's plot finally leads the couple to consider using Richard's sperm to fertilize a donor egg. Because Rachel would carry the baby, a donor might represent the closest the couple can get to biological reproduction.

Richard often turns to his brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) for money; Charlie's wife (Molly Shannon) is sick of hearing about Richard and Rachel's problems, another source of low-key tension.

Once an initially reluctant Rachel agrees to use a donor egg, it falls to Charlie and Rachel's daughter Sadie (Kayli Carter) to become the donor. Sadie has left college to move in with Richard and Rachel. An aspiring writer, Sadie thinks Richard and Rachel are "cool,'' a conclusion only a 25-year-old could draw about a couple that's suffering from the kind of life exhaustion that shows up just before the skin begins to wrinkle.

Jenkins writes with wit and Giamatti and Hahn create characters who are intelligent and credible.

You don't have to have had any experience with the difficulties of getting pregnant to enjoy a comedy that is saved from charges of urbane preciousnesses by Giamatti and Hahn. They're each blessed with the ability to create characters who are believably self-aware and who never push us so far away that we can't appreciate their full, rich and often annoying selves.

A ribald sex farce set in a nunnery

Inspired by Boccaccio's The Decameron, The Little Hours is an unapologetic sex farce built around a 14th Century nunnery where the sisters are anything but pious. In the hands of director Jeff Baena, Little Hours attempts to banish the shame that often surrounds repressed desire, particularly in a convent to which many of the women have been sent because their families don't know what else to do with them. Three nuns (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci) connive under the supervision of a mother superior (Molly Shannon), who's no saint, either. The plot kicks into a higher gear when the resident priest (John C. Reilly) introduces a hunky runaway (Dave Franco) into the mix. Franco's Massetto has taken flight because a nobleman (Nick Offerman) caught him dallying with the lady of the household (Lauren Weedman). Reilly's father Tommasso deceives the nuns, telling them that Massetto is deaf and mute, a complication that adds to the movie's cleverly calculated misunderstandings. Fred Armisen plays a bishop who shows up late in the proceedings to condemn everyone's behavior. Baena makes his intentions clear from the outset with ample use of the "F" word as he pushes (perhaps too hard) toward irreverence. Avoiding period language, the movie genially embraces the all-too-human pursuit of pleasure. Put another way, Little Hours seems to be saying that, despite admonitions to the contrary, bawdy isn't necessarily bad. Amusing when it's working, which (alas) isn't all of the time.