An adled foray into academia

 

Michael Shannon embodies the uncertainties of a confused man  in A Little White Lie, a comedy about literary pretensions in the academic world. Director Michael Maren, who also wrong the screenplay, concocts a story about a New York janitor who's mistaken for a mysterious novelist who wrote one highly acclaimed book before vanishing from the publishing scene. Both novelist and janitor have the same name, do the mixup seems plausible. Desperate to save a literary festival at a small California college, the festival's organizer (Kate Hudson) invites Shannon's character to headline the event. Shannon's Shriver attends; the rest of the attendees take his baffled quality as a form of genius. The great author must be tolerated. Don Johnson portrays a professor who has seen better days. Shannon' role that turns him into a man without a core identity but with flickers of conscience that impedes his ability to carry out a con. Hudson gives a lively performance and Johnson makes the most of a small role. The ending adds an unusual, if not entirely convincing twist to the proceedings. The movie plays with ideas about identity and the perils of early literary success but isn't witty enough to be an intellectual head-spinner of a movie. A short speech that Shannon gives during a forum on art and reality should be clipped from the movie and preserved as a beautiful piece of work in an otherwise negligible effort.

It's Oscar time again. How much do you care?

    

Everything Everywhere All At Once seems to be the frontrunner for best picture.
   

    Host Jimmy Kimmel no doubt will make jokes about The Slap. One upset will elicit gasps, as will at least one presenter’s choice of clothing. 

    Brendan Gleeson will go home without an Oscar despite being one of the best actors on the entire list of male nominees. Gleeson is nominated for best supporting actor for his imposing performance in The Banshees of Inisherin. 

   To be honest, I'm not especially excited about this year's awards. The nominated pictures are mostly worthy but the Oscars seem to mean a good deal more to those who've been nominated and to the distributors of their films than to those of us who watch. 

   I won’t admire Michelle Yeoh any less if she happens to lose in the best actress category to Cate Blanchett.  Similarly, if Yeoh wins, I won’t waste any time feeling sorry for Blanchett. 

   I wasn’t a fan of The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobigographical movie, but if it scores a surprise win as best picture, I will spend no time crying in my beer.

   Bill Nighy (Living) and Paul Mescal (Aftersun) are terrific actors and Nighy is now bordering on lifetime achievement terrain. Both are nominated for best actor and, if the oddsmakers are right, they'll lose to Austin Butler for his performance in Elvis. 

   I’m rooting for Colin Farrell, who has become one of the screen’s more adventurous actors. 

    I cast no shade on Jamie Lee Curtis for her hilarious work in Everything Everywhere All At Once. She's the favorite in the best supporting actress category. But I don’t see how the Academy can bypass Angela Bassett who brought a sense of regal grandeur and dignity to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. 

   This year’s field represents a variety of approaches to movies -- from sci-fi fantasy to hard-core action to smart drama. This kind of range either can be seen as refreshingly positive or as an indication that Hollywood has no idea what it’s doing. 

   Perhaps both things are true.

   And a reminder:  Caring about the Academy Awards isn’t the same as caring about movies or, without being too grandiose about it, film culture or, in cases where appropriate, film art. All of those categories can but don’t necessarily overlap with Oscar. 

   Here, with the usual tentativeness and with some annotated reservations, are my predictions in some of the major categories:*

Best Picture

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Best Director

Daniel Dwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once*

*The dark horse in this category is Steven Spielberg. A victory for Spielberg would be a way of honoring "old"  Hollywood in a year of idiosyncratic fare. 

Best Actor

Austin Butler, Elvis*

*I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Brendan Fraser wins for his performance in The Whale. 

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett, Tar*

*Look, Michelle Yeoh is just as likely to win for her work in Everything Everywhere All At Once, but until Everything Everywhere began its awards ascent, Blanchett was considered a shoo-in.

Best Supporting Actor

Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best supporting actress

Angela Bassett, Black Panther Wakanda Forever*

*I've read speculation about Kerry Condon, who did stand-out work in Banshees of Inishirin. I suppose that if Bassett and Jamie Lee Curtis, many people's projected winner in this category, cancel each other out, Condon has a shot.

Best Original Screenplay

The Banshees of Inishirn 

Best Adapted Screenplay

Women Talking

Best Animated Film

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Best International Film

All Quiet on the Western Front 

YAs and Mozart? Hey, the music's good

   

    The Magic Flute, Mozart's acclaimed opera, has gone YA.

    Director Florian Sigl creates a hybrid production that combines a fanciful effects-laden production of Mozart's opera with a tale about kids at an elite boarding school for budding musicians.

    Jack Wolfe, seen in Netflix's Shadow and Bone series, plays 17-year-old Tim, an aspiring singer who's sent to a prestigious Mozart academy. The stern Dr. Longbow (F. Murray Abraham) presides over the school, sort of a Hogwarts for musical prodigies.

    Sigl splits the film into intertwining parts. One involves the life of the school and plays like a typical teen movie. In the movie's more fantastical segments, Tim travels through a magic portal and winds up in Mozart's opera.

    As Prince Tamino, he wanders the opera's enchanted landscapes with the mischievous Papageno (Iwan Rheon). The two must survive various tests to subdue the Queen of the Night (Sabine Devielhe) and find true love, Tamino with Princess Pamina (Asha Banks) and Papageno with Papagena (Stefi Celma). 

   Sarastro (Morris Robinson) opposes The Queen of Night; he poses the tests and gives the proceedings a heavy bass voice. 

    For me, the FX-dominated world in which the opera unfolds beat the boarding school environment,  a place to touch on many usual teen concerns.

    Then there's this: The movie may work as an introduction to Mozart for tweens and teens. Otherwise, it seems unclear for whom the movie was made.

     The singing, by the way, is in English, as is the rest of the movie.  It's hardly surprising that the music is good.

It aims to be killer comedy. Sorry, no

Netflix's Grace and Frankie has gone a long way toward establishing Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda as an on-screen duo. Tomlin and Fonda also joined forces (along with Sally Field) in the recent 80 for Brady. Haven't had enough? You're in luck. Fonda and Tomlin return in director Peter Weitz's Moving On, a movie in which they play college pals who reunite at the funeral of another college friend. Tomlin, as a lesbian cello player living in an assisted living facility, and Fonda, as a widow who abandoned her dreams, work with ease but the screenplay has trouble accommodating both the story's serious and comic elements. Fonda's Claire wants to avenge a decades-old incident with the husband (Malcolm McDowell) of the woman whose funeral she's attending. At the wake, she tells McDowell's Howard that she plans to kill him, not exactly the stuff of sympathy cards. Tomlin doles out acerbic remarks and hard-hitting doses of truth as Claire plots her vengeance. Serious attempts at dealing with the problems of aging (loneliness, abandoned pursuits, and physical infirmity) might have made for a better movie than the quasi comic elements revolving around Claire's vengeful intentions.  We eventually learn why Claire has remained so angry but the revelation proves too weighty for a comedy.  The point: If comedy is hard, dark comedy is even harder. With Richard Roundtree, who -- judging by his work here as one of Clarie's former husbands -- should be employed more.

The hard life of a nine-year-old girl

 

Made in Irish Gaelic with subtitles, The Quiet Girl introduces us to a poor Irish family. Dad (Michael Patric) squanders the family's resources with a gambling habit. A weary Mom (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) has trouble coping with a growing brood and is pregnant again. The kids go to school wearing dirty clothes. Out of this desperation, nine-year-old Cait (Catherine Clinch) is sent to live with one of Mom’s cousins and her husband (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett). Unlike Cait’s family, her new caretakers seem to be living reasonably well. Although it takes time for Bennett’s character to soften, Cait finally learns something about how adults can love and nurture children. For the first time, she’s living in an environment that’s not emotionally impoverished.  Cait’s "new" family has had to cope with a deep grief of its own and the movie, like its characters, knows something about muted sorrow. Director Colm Bairead adapts a short story by Claire Keegan to beautiful effect. Blanching the story of melodrama, Bairead creates deep feeling for Cait’s loneliness and the natural inability of a nine-year-old to grasp a complicated situation. A quietly moving piece of Irish cinema, The Quiet Girl doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, but it sure as hell has one.

 

'Champions' is no slam-dunk

     Woody Harrelson plays a basketball coach with a bad temper in Champions, a movie in which Harrelson's Marcus falls from coaching grace, drives while under the influence, and winds up sentenced to community service. His assignment: coaching a team of developmentally disabled youngsters.

     Unlike in basketball games, no clear winner emerges in a movie that wobbles across familiar terrain. Director Bobby Farrelly remakes the Spanish film Campeones to mixed results. Echoes of The Bad News Bears and a variety of other underdog movies ring throughout. 

     Teaching the kids, who seem to enjoy goofy behavior, can be difficult: One of them (Bradley Edens) insists on shooting the ball backward over his head. He never makes a shot but considers himself a master at the art of celebration.

    The young players aren't highly skilled but one of them (Joshua Felder) had a shot at collegiate ball until he suffered a brain injury in a car accident. Felder's Darius could help the team. He refuses to play. Can Marcus change his mind? 

    Madison Tevlin plays Cosentino, the sole female member of the team and one of the more spirited young actors.

    Modest and minimally amusing, the movie introduces a bit of romance when Marcus realizes that a woman (Kaitlin Olson) he once slept with is the older sister of one of the players (Kevin Iannucci) on his happily inept team. 

   In addition to Harrelson, two other adults have notable roles: An underutilized Ernie Hudson plays the college basketball coach who fires assistant coach Marcus for bad behavior, thus getting the story started.

    Adopting a social worker's knowing but compassionate demeanor, Cheech Marin portrays Julio, the head of the community center where the team -- known as The Friends -- practices.

    A predictable story arc dribbles toward the inevitable big game while Marcus learns to set aside his bitterness and become a mensch and Iannucci's character struggles to convince his sister to allow him to move into a group home.

  In  the past, Farrelly has worked with his brother Peter on movies such as There's Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber, and Shallow Hall.  That resume should let you know that Champions doesn't tug too hard on the heartstrings. I guess that's good.

  But the movie's various elements -- from raunchy teen humor to the conspicuous shattering of stereotypes -- don't cohere into a winning whole. Unlike more satisfying formula jobs,  Champions takes its shot only to watch the ball bounce off the rim.

All dressed up with nowhere new to go

 

   In Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Jason Statham joins director Guy Ritchie for a spy/caper movie that feels as if a lot of ingredients were thrown into a blender in the hope that a movie would emerge. It didn’t. Not really.

  Adopting the seriousness of a man who might have just lost his best friend, Stratham plays Orson Fortune, a mercenary who operates outside official channels. You know the drill. Orson fights the good fight but remains his own man. 

  Ritchie has been creating visual razzle-dazzle ever since his breakthrough with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, some 24 years ago. This time, he offers a less frenzied movie. We’re talking comparatively, of course.

   The story kicks off when (Cary Elwes), as a suave fellow who recruits espionage crews, enlists Orson to locate a weapon that has found its way onto the market.

   British intelligence -- represented by a character played by Eddie Marsan -- doesn't know what the object is. That's the job: Find out what's for sale and make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. 

   Joining Fortune are Aubrey Plaza (as a sexy tech whiz) and Bugzy Malone (as a sharpshooter).  Both are underutilized.

    It doesn't take long for Fortune to encounter Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), a sleazy arms dealer with tons of money. Sounding as if he's channeling Michael Caine's accent, Grant seems to be having more fun than anyone else in the movie. 

   Josh Hartnett joins in as Danny, a movie star who's supposed to help infiltrate the operation run by the star-struck Simmonds. That could happen, right?

    If you see Operation Fortune, it's probably best to give up on coherence and enjoy Grant's happy scenery chewing in a movie that sometimes plays like an off-the-rack helping of Bond. 

     Ritchie's too skilled totally to hit bottom, even with a movie that slides over what feels like old ground. Ritchie makes good use of luxe locations and (thank goodness) doesn't seem to be taking himself seriously.

     Most of the characters, by the way, are very well dressed.

     Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not recommending Operation Fortune; I’m talking about how to approach the movie if you happen to give it a try — now or in its non-theatrical afterlife.

Creed faces a fierce opponent from his past

     

   When Creed III opens, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) is living a luxurious retired life in Los Angeles. The former heavyweight champ spends time with his wife (Tessa Thompson) and daughter (Mila Davis-Kent). He also runs a gym where he trains promising young boxers.

   Life is good for Adonis but no one would want to watch a movie about a boxer who leads a well-adjusted and productive life outside the ring.

   Enter Damien (Jonathan Majors), a buddy from the days when Adonis was a street kid. Damien also had a promising future as a boxer but got busted for a using a gun in a fight. Adonis was with him and blames himself for escaping without consequences. Damien did 18 years in the slammer.

   Damien clearly has an agenda, and the guilt-ridden Adonis believes he can't escape a psychological debt acquired during his adolescence.

    We see some of Adonis's youth in flashbacks in which he’s played by Thaddeus James Mixson Jr. He and young Damien (Spence Moore II) once were bros.

    It’s payback time and Damien now wants Creed to arrange a title fight for him. 

   Jordan, who also directs, offers an efficient Creed sequel, banishing nuance in favor of plot points that land like punches. As Damien’s fortunes build, he remains a character Majors portrays with menacing force. 

    Currently on view in Ant-Man: Quntumania, Majors gives Damien an impacted brutality that's emphasized by his crouched fighting style. The movie's most vividly drawn character, Damien's a vengeful man driven to threats of violence against Adonis and his family.

    The only way to stop him? See a counselor who specializes in mediating emotionally charged disputes?

    Nah. Creed must come out retirement and try to recapture the title Damien has won, improbably for a guy who's a bit long in the tooth to be making a big-time professional debut.

    A showdown looms.

   Jordan stages the big fight with more oomph than realism. This, after all, isn’t Raging Bull; it’s an attempt to continue the life of a character, who, thus far, has carried two movies over a profitable finish line.  

   Absent from all of this is Sylvester Stallone, who has a producing credit. The oddball teaming of Stallone and Jordan in previous movies added something that Creed III lacks, an appropriately corny connection to the original Rocky movies.

  Still, Jordan and Masters energize the movie -- with a bit of help, of course. Phylicia Rashad signs on as Adonis’s mother and Wood Harris plays the trainer who warns Adonis against taking on Damien in the first place.

  Screenwriters Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin use Adonis’s daughter and his ailing mother to soften Creed's dramatic muscle flexing.

  Adonis’s daughter is deaf and the movie features signing between mom and daughter and dad and daughter.

  Mom, too, has experienced a hearing loss. She's had to adjust her musical career, a secondary storyline that gives her a parallel problem to Adonis's woes, accepting new personal expectations.

    Enough. Creed III doesn't always make it easy to suspend disbelief nor does the movie work as a pure fable about underdog  triumphs. To me, Jordan's Creed seldom seemed like anything but a winner.

    Creed III occupies its own world. Maybe that's sufficient. I'd give Creed III a pass but I wouldn’t be sorry if Jordan were to hang up the gloves and devote his considerable talents to other endeavors. 

     At the same time, I wouldn’t bet against Creed IV.

    Successful movie franchises are difficult to resist -- for the folks who make them and for audiences that never seem to tire of return trips.

Does she know where she belongs?

   

   In director Davy Chou's Return to Seoul we meet a young woman with a Korean/French background (Park Ji-min) who was adapted as a baby and raised in France.

   At age 25, Freddie returns to Korea without a clear agenda but soon learns of an agency that can help locate her biological parents. No guarantees. The parents may not be willing to meet with her.

   That sounds like the setup for a conventional movie that takes its main character on a tearful journey of reconciliation.

   But Chou has other things in mind. To begin with, he builds  his movie around a character who is not especially likable, thus accepting a degree of risk more conventional filmmakers might avoid.

  Chou tells Freddie’s story over the course of eight years, jumping through time and dividing his movie into segments. Freddie lives through various phases of an evolution that has no clear destination.

   Early on, Freddie makes it clear to a young woman she meets upon her arrival (Guka Han) in Seoul that she has little interest in honoring Korean traditions. At a social gathering at a restaurant, she flaunts propriety, confronting a group of strangers with her daring and aggression, inserting herself into their evening of drinking.

   When Freddie meets her biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), she shows little interest in establishing the connection her guilty-ridden dad craves. 

  Oh’s character gives the movie a desperately sorrowful core; a heavy drinker, he's mired in remorse about having given up a daughter during a particularly difficult time. He now has a wife and children but can’t accept Freddie’s indifference.

   Giving us barely enough time to adjust, Chou again leaps ahead by two years. Freddie presumably has remained in Korea, where she spends her time club hopping.    

   She also meets with an older French man (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) who hires her as a sales person for his company, which happens to deal in armaments, a trade of dubious morality.

   In another episode years later, Freddie returns to Korea with her French boyfriend (Yoann Zimmer). He accompanies her to a dinner with her father and an aunt (Kim Sun-young) who serves as a translator.

   The boyfriend tries to be supportive. It doesn’t take long for Freddie to kick him to the curb, dispensing with him with a snap of the fingers. She understands how quickly stability can be undermined and perhaps even takes willful pleasure in asserting control, even if through cruelty.

   You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned Freddie’s biological mother.  You'll have to see the movie to know why.

    Do we ever warm up to Freddie? Not really. She remains frustratingly separate from those she encounters and from us, as well.

  That makes Return to Seoul a movie about dislocation, anger and living through a puzzle where the pieces never seem to fit together. 

   Contrarily to expectation, Freddie may not be trying to find some kind of inner harmony. Instead, she's driven by needs, emotions, and sometimes by defensive postures that have become part of the strategy with which she approaches the world.

  That’s another way of saying we don’t have to like Freddie — only to find her intriguing and, more important, challenging.