Movie Diary
a) Blue Moon
I always knew that a bunch of major musicals and timeless songs were written by Rodgers & Hart, and a bunch more were written by Rodgers & Hammerstein, but I didn't know much about why Richard Rodgers changed writing partners. Blue Moon captures the moment when Rodgers & Hammerstein were having their first major success together with Oklahoma! and Lorenz Hart, his career in shambles from alcoholism, was months away from dying of pneumonia. Ethan Hawke gives a great performance as Hart, and I don't think I'd mind if this was the movie that finally got him an Oscar, but it is a little irritating to see someone who looks like Ethan Hawke palying someone who was bald and about 10 inches shorter than him, as if they couldn't find an actor who actually looks like Lorenz Hart to play the part. It's not as bad as Colin Farrell with the big rubber face playing The Penguin, but I have to roll my eyes a little at these eternally handsome movie stars uglying up to take away roles from character actors.
Another movie based on a true story about musicians with "blue" in the title that got one of its stars an Oscar nomination! My mother has lived for the last several years in Milwaukee, where Lightning and Thunder were local heroes, and she's actually met Claire Sardina, and she really raved about the movie when it came out. So I was happy to finally see it when it hit streaming recently, and it's really good, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson each give one of the best performances of their careers and it just felt like a lovely tribute to Mike and Claire's story, Neil Diamond's music, and the life of a gigging musician. That middle section of the movie gets surprisingly dark and real, but the tonal shift works. In a weird way this is the closest Craig Brewer has come to really following up Hustle & Flow, with Neil Diamond songs in place of Three 6 Mafia songs. I'm a music journalist, so I'm always a little weary the way perfectly interesting true stories get distorted and compressed in music biopics, and Song Sung Blue turns a 19-year-relationship into a 3-year story. I got into an exchange with Brewer on Twitter about the timeline of the movie, but he was very nice about it and I ultimately respect the choices he made as a filmmaker.
Paul McCartney's interviews for this new documentary about his life in the '70s are all audio voiceover, you can hear that it's modern day 80-something Paul, but you only ever see his face as a young man in his prime. And the movie really benefits from his current day perspective about all the scrutiny and backlash he endured after the breakup of the Beatles and what was on his mind through it all, and how he's probably got some more peace of mind about it all now. I found Morgan Neville's direction a little over overstuffed, there was just a lot of little visual things where they'd chop up and manipulate footage or put things on billboards that I found kind of tiresome and unimpressive, they had enough interesting footage and interviews that the bells and whistles felt unnecessary.
One to One doesn't have any formal connection to Man on the Run, but it's also about John Lennon's life immediately after the Beatles, albeit a more specific moment in the early '70s, so I decided to watch them both this week. I thought One to One might be mostly a concert film of Lennon's only full-length post-Beatles solo concert, but it was about a lot more than that, and honestly I think is the best depiction and explanation of Lennon's political activism that I've ever seen and gave me more respect for the specific issues he stuck his neck out on and how he tried to make the world a better place. I also thought the directors Kevin Macdonald and Same Rice-Edwards connected what Lennon was doing to a broader cultural context really well and did clever visual things with audio from phone calls.
Andrew Stanton is one of the real geniuses behind Pixar who wrote and/or directed several classics including Wall-E and Finding Nemo. His first live action directorial effort, John Carter, was a big budget flop, and his second, In the Blink of an Eye, was recently released on Hulu. In some ways it's a very ambitious movie that spans virtually the whole of human existence, from cavemen to space exploration, and it's easy to imagine a more kid-friendly version of this maybe being conceptualized as an animated movie in the style of Wall-E. What it ended up as, though, is this odd little low-budget movie starring Kate McKinnon and Rashida Jones that almost feels like something you'd see in the IMAX theater in a science center with some half-hearted attempts at compelling adult drama shoehorned in, it's frustrating that someone as talented as Stanton just could not make this thing work.
Originality isn't really important when it comes to romcoms, and People We Meet On Vacation doesn't get substantially less derivative of When Harry Met Sally after the opening scenes where Emily Bader and Tom Blyth don't like each other at all while going on a road trip together. But I thought it was really excellent, easily one of the best romcoms I've seen the last few years, great performance from Bader and some snappy dialogue and genuine onscreen chemistry.
g) Swiped
A lightweight but moderately enjoyable Social Network-style movie about the CEO of Bumble with a whole lot of scenes that make you go "that definitely never happened in real life." It stars Lily James, daughter of Phil, and there's a silly meta scene where Myha'la's character plays the "In The Air Tonight" drum fill and says that Collins's character probably loves Phil Collins.
h) Trap House
A pretty solid action movie with a somewhat ridiculous premise, I feel like Dave Bautista is a name you can trust at this point, just about everything he acts in is, if not great, then very good within its modest genre parameters.
i) The Outrun
A great performance from Saoirse Ronan in this, at least as good as any of her Oscar-nominated roles.
j) Fall
One of those silly movies where two women are in a terrifying ordeal, stuck at the top of a 2,000-foot tower for several days, but still just look absurdly glamorous for the entire movie. The premise is kind of half-baked and then the 'twist' is really stupid, but I enjoyed it.
k) The Sound
Another movie about mountain climbers in a dangerous situation, but a little more high concept, a little more dedicated to depicting climbing realistically, and a little less engaging overall. .
l) Eden
In that weird cultural panic where Sydney Sweeney was getting more famous and people became obsessed with pretending to know what her political views were and making sure she was punished for them, Eden was one of those movies that people rooted for the failure of, even though she's like fourth-billed. A decent Ron Howard movie about a fascinating moment in history, where a group of Europeans tried to settle an island in the Galapagos in the 1930s, Ana de Armas is particularly good, one of her best performances.
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