Ethan Hawke has turned out to be one of our finest actors. I used to have a big crush on him back in the days, but nowadays he kind of looks like a meth addict. Even though I didn’t really love ‘First Reformed,’ I thought he was so good in that film that the performance should have gotten an Academy Award nomination. His streak of great performances continue with ‘Adopt A Highway,’ where he plays Russell, a convict who just gets released from prison (for possession of an ounce of weed!) He plays the character with resentment and vulnerability. The film is all over the place but I thought it was still thought provoking, and the pay off on the end surprisingly effective.
I also liked ‘Holly Slept Over.’ It’s about a couple, Audra and Noel who is trying to conceive a child. When her old college roommate visits, this gives Audra a chance to evaluate her fractured relationship with Holly – they had had a college fling when they were younger. Holly then gets invited for a threesome, and well, we all know where that can go. I liked the first half of the film more – there is so much talk about Holly that when she finally shows up, she diesn;t quite live up to the hype.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year and he opened the festival this year with ‘The Truth,’ his first non-Japanese film. This film is set in Paris, and the dialogue is in both French and English. Catherine Deneuve here stars as Fabienne, an old-school movie star who has just released her memoirs. At the beginning of the film, we see her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) arrive with her husband and daughter to celebrate the book’s launch, but when she starts reading the book she finds out that it contains a multitudes of lies, like her father being listed as dead, and, more alarming for her, that Fabienne has painted herself as a great mother. And the film goes through how everyone deals with that. For example, Fabienne’s long-doting assistant is not even mentioned, prompting him to quit, leaving Lumir to act as one while she is vacationing. This film is more an exercise in great effortless acting. Deneuve is delicious as the self-centered Fabienne, who, like any other actress out there, has no concept of reality. And Binoche can only be described for making us all believe that she is playing a woman who turns to screenplay writing because she is a terrible actress. We gleefully watch these two in action before we realize there isn’t much plot or story here. But for the most part, we don’t mind.
It seems that the rom-com is really alive and well. Jesse Peretz’s ‘Juliet, Naked’ is funny, unpredictable, heartwarming – all of the things I am looking for in a romantic comedy. And as a music fan, this is also a celebration of how art affects you and drives a lot of aspects of your life.
‘First Reformed’ is one of those tough films to describe. It was described by Fandango as a thriller, and I went in with that frame of mind It incites thrill, alright, but in a whole different manner. It’s not a plot driven movie, as it is mostly a character study of Ernst Toller, a pastor of First Reformed Church somewhere in Upstate New York. he presides over one of those small churches that is only alive because of its historical significance. On any given Sunday, there are only a handful of parishioners who go there – most folks go to the mega church down the road. In fact, the same mega church funds First Reformed. I am not going to go over the rest of the plot, as I think it;’s mostly irrelevant. We see Toller spiral out of control because of a set of setbacks, among which he is urinating blood because of cancer, and has gotten involved in the life of two parishioners – a married couple with issues, and bo have they got issues.
There is something very poetic about ‘Maudie.’
I really wanted to love Rebecca Miller’s new movie ‘Maggie’s Plan,’ and halfway through the movie, as I am realizing I don’t even like it, I started to question myself why. Maybe it stems from my irrational dislike of the actress Greta Gerwig – there’s something about her that annoys me and thus I never could get into – much less believe – any of her characters.I tried giving her the slack so many times here, but with her as the heroine of the film, I just couldn’t go on-board. I was banking on the idea that Julianne Moore will steal the film from her, but her character her seems to be a SNL parody, though she tries very hard to give it vulnerability, and nearly succeeds. I read a comment about the movie that it is a “New Yorker short story,’ and I think that’s an apt description, but I even think the magazine would reject this. There’s just so much good things here that did not account to a great whole that I couldn’t help but feel so disappointed. I wanted to feel characters that are New Yorkers – neurotic, sophisticated, pedantic in the most appropriate way – but here we get neurosis and no backing behind them. I just imagine how this film would have fared in the hands of Noah Baumbach, or Woody Allen (though the latter doesn’t seem to be doing New York movies anymore) and think there could have been real gold in here.
Luha Thoughts 