The Dinner

Another film on my never-ending list is The Dinner and I was able to cross it off last night.  Paul (Steve Coogan), a former history teacher with a history of mental illness, his long-suffering wife Claire (Laura Linney), his brother Stan (Richard Gere), a successful congressman currently running for governor, and Stan's second wife Katelyn (Rebecca Hall) meet each other at an exclusive and unbelievably pretentious restaurant to talk about a family crisis involving their teenage sons.  The dinner is fraught with tension and as each course is elaborately served (and labeled with on-screen titles), a layer is removed revealing their incredibly dysfunctional family dynamic and we learn that their boys have committed a horrific crime and that each of them have differing opinions about how to deal with the situation.  Much of the film involves the characters hashing it out at the dinner table and in various locations within the restaurant but there are also quite a few flashbacks which, for the most part, effectively illustrate how the relationships have become so combative (Chloe Sevigny appears in flashbacks at Stan's first wife).  One of them, however, involving a visit by the two brothers to Gettysburg seemed to go on and on, belaboring the point that a house divided against itself cannot stand.  All of these characters are pretty unlikable, even the one character who advocates that they do the right thing ultimately wavers, but all four actors give incredibly nuanced performances (I was especially impressed by Hall).  The Dinner is not an easy film to watch (at one point I had to turn away while one person in my screening left at that same moment) and the ambiguous ending left me a bit unsettled but, since I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, I highly recommend it as a thought-provoking morality play.

Their Finest

Yesterday I spent the afternoon watching the charming and delightful film, Their Finest.  I saw this at the Sundance Film Festival this year and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to see it again in wide release.   In 1940 the Ministry of Information, Film Division, is trying to boost morale at home and convince America to enter the war during the London Blitz.  They hear of an inspiring story about two young girls who took their father's boat to rescue soldiers stranded at Dunkirk and decide to make a film about their heroism.  An advertising copywriter named Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is hired to write the "slop," or women's perspective, in the screenplay.  At first the other screenwriters Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) and Raymond Parfitt (Paul Ritter) are resentful of her involvement but they come to rely on her more and more and, of course, Catrin and Tom eventually develop feelings for each other.  There are some really somber scenes as almost every character deals with the effects of the nightly bombing during the Blitz (I don't know how people lived through the terror and uncertainty of the Blitz) but there are also some hilarious scenes when they begin filming on location, especially with the pompous actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy).  I have always been a big fan of Nighy but here he is at his most overwrought best.  He pretty much steals every scene he is in.  Both Arterton and Claflin give solid performances and I was very engaged with their romance, even upon a second viewing.  I recommend this film as a pleasant afternoon diversion.

A Quiet Passion

Last night I went to see A Quiet Passion, an exquisite biopic about the life and work of Emily Dickinson.  We meet Emily as a young girl (played by Emma Bell) rebelling against the strict confines of her school, Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary.  Then she (played hereafter by Cynthia Nixon) returns to her home and family in Amherst, Massachusetts where she lives quietly and channels her overwhelming emotions into her poetry.  The story is told through a series of vignettes, mostly consisting of conversations with her stern father (Keith Carradine), her melancholy mother (Joanna Bacon), her brother Austin (Duncan Duff), her beloved sister Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle), her unconventional friend Vryling Buffum (Catherine Bailey), and her long-suffering sister-in-law Susan (Jodhi May), and a voice-over of Nixon reading Dickinson's poetry.  Because her life was so circumscribed, director Terence Davies imbues every single scene, even the most mundane shot of Emily sitting at her desk, with importance through beautiful composition and lighting.  My favorite moment in the whole film is a 360 degree shot which begins with Emily silently reading then circles the room showing members of her family spending a quiet evening in the drawing room and then returns to Emily in despair.  Nothing much is happening but it is beautifully shot and shows so much emotion.  Most of the film can be described in this way but it is incredibly moving and engrossing because of Nixon's astonishing performance.  She is able to convey all of Dickinson's innermost feelings with just an expression.  I loved this film because I am a fan of Emily Dickinson's poetry and I love character-driven biographies about complicated people but it is definitely not for everyone.

Cezanne et Moi

There are quite a few movies currently at the Broadway that I want to see and one of them, Cezanne at Moi, has a very limited engagement so I thought I had better see it last night.  This film is a luminous biopic about the turbulent friendship between Emile Zola (Guillaume Canet) and Paul Cezanne (Guillaume Gallienne) and I loved it.  The narrative begins when the two men are in middle age.  Zola is a successful author who has become one of the bourgeoisie he was so disdainful of as a young and penniless poet while Cezanne is still a fiery rebel estranged from his wealthy family who has yet to experience the success that would come to him at the end of his life.  There are flashbacks to their childhood in Aix en Provence, their days as struggling artists in Paris, and the rift in their friendship as Zola achieves more and more success and Cezanne becomes increasingly erratic.  The film reaches its climax in a scene fraught with tension as they hurl accusations at each other, each desiring what the other has.  This film is beautiful, almost as if you are watching one of Cezanne's paintings coming to life on the screen, and both Canet and Gallienne give incredibly powerful performances.  However, it is most definitely character, rather than plot, driven and the flashbacks are very nonlinear.  Also, there are lots of obscure references to art and literature that not everyone will be able to appreciate and I should mention that this film is in French with English subtitles.  It is definitely not for everyone but if you enjoy period pieces about interesting and complicated people, I highly recommend Cezanne et Moi.

Colossal

When Colossal was screened at the Sundance Film Festival this year I honestly didn't have any desire to see it.  A couple of things changed my mind.  First, I saw a preview last week which was very intriguing and, then, a few friends who saw at Sundance raved about it in advance of its wide release so I decided to take in a matinee yesterday.  Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is a young woman living in New York and, frankly, she is a complete mess.  She has been unemployed for over a year and, after staggering home from a night of drinking, her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) kicks her out of their apartment.  She is forced to move back into her childhood home, where she literally sleeps on an air mattress on the floor, and she reconnects with Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood friend.  She continues her destructive behavior by drinking every night with Oscar and his friends.  Clearly, she has a few inner demons but her demons manifest themselves as a giant lizard-like monster who terrorizes the people of Seoul, South Korea.  She is horrified when she realizes that she is responsible for the death of many innocent people and tries to discover a way to stop the monster.  As the story continues, Oscar's demons, which manifest themselves as a giant robot, are revealed and the two of them must resolve a conflict from childhood in an epic showdown.  I found this story to be highly original and entertaining, if a bit strange, and the ending was incredibly satisfying.  I usually like Anne Hathaway and I found her portrayal of Gloria to be sympathetic.  Conversely, I found Jason Sudeikis' Oscar to be quite disturbing; in fact, there were moments when I truly despised him.  Amid the bad behavior and the B-movie monsters, there is a really powerful message about bullying and I'm glad that I decided to see it.

Frantz

Last night I saw the absolutely beautiful film Frantz at the Broadway.  It is one of the best films about the aftermath of war that I've ever seen.  After World War I, a young German woman named Anna (Paula Beer) is mourning the loss of her fiancee Frantz (played by Anton Von Lucke in flashbacks).  She frequently visits his grave and one day she notices that flowers have been left by a stranger who turns out to be Adrien (Pierre Niney), a Frenchman who claims to have known Frantz before the war.  He and Anna form a close bond as he tells her about their friendship and, while his presence is initially met with resistance by Frantz's family, he eventually brings them comfort.  When Adrien leaves Germany, after a startling revelation, Anna cannot get him out of her mind and travels to France in the hopes of reestablishing their connection (where she faces the same hostility that Adrien experienced in Germany).  After another revelation, Anna must learn to let go of the past and live a different life from the one she had imagined.  Based on the 1932 Ernst Lubitsch film Broken Lullaby, it explores the lingering pain and loss after a war, the antagonism remaining in peacetime between two countries who were once enemies, and the need for forgiveness for deeds committed in wartime.  It is quite atmospheric and very moving.  Most of the film is in black and white, with brief interludes of color during scenes before the war and during moments of happiness, which is highly effective in conveying a mood, and both Beer and Niney give absolutely haunting performances.  I loved this film and I highly recommend it.

Note:  Frantz was the second independent foreign film with subtitles that I saw this week (third if you count this film because I saw again with English subtitles, which I much preferred to the dubbed version).  I am nothing if not pretentious!

Land of Mine

Last night I went to see the film Land of Mine at the Broadway, my favorite art house theater.  Doesn't everyone spend their Friday nights watching independent foreign films with subtitles?  In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Sergeant Carl Leopold Rasmussen (Roland Moller) is given command of a group of German POWs who are tasked with removing hundreds of thousands of land mines on the western coast of Denmark.  We are not given Rasmussen's backstory but he has clearly been shattered by the events of the war and torments the POWs, most of whom are young boys conscripted at the end of the war, as a way of exacting revenge against Germany.  Their living conditions are deplorable and their job of locating and then defusing the bombs is dangerous, to say the least.  As we get to know and care about these boys, we are never allowed to forget the ever-present possibility that they could be killed by an explosion at any moment.  As a result, many of the scenes of them on the beach are fraught with tension, and occasionally horror.  At the crux of the story is Rasmussen's journey from hatred to compassion as he gets to know them as individuals rather than as the enemy and this is incredibly powerful.  There is a touching scene where one of the boys clears a path to rescue a Danish girl who has wandered on to the beach and I also loved the scene where Rasmussen plays soccer with the boys on part of the beach that has been cleared.  The cinematography is exceptional with widescreen shots of the endless beach which serve to show how daunting the task of removing all of the mines truly is.  I found this film to be both beautiful and terrible (the explosions are unbelievably difficult to watch) and I thought it was an interesting deviation from the standard war movie where heroes and villains are clearly defined.  I highly recommend it.

Note:  After watching this film, I spontaneously decided to see Personal Shopper again.  I simply cannot stop thinking about it.

Personal Shopper

I really enjoyed The Clouds of Sils Maria so I have been looking forward to Personal Shopper, the latest collaboration between Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart.  I saw it last night and my mind was blown.  Maureen (Stewart) has moved to Paris to visit the house where her twin brother died of the same congenital heart condition that she has.  The two of them made a vow that whoever died first would return to give the other a sign that there is an afterlife.  As she waits for this sign, she works as a personal shopper for a celebrity, borrowing couture clothing and designer jewelry for her client to be photographed in.  Maureen is haunted by a spirit in her brother's house (in some of the scariest scenes I've ever seen) and is harassed by an unknown stalker who sends her menacing texts.  The film begins as a typical ghost story, then becomes a murder mystery, and ends as a psychological study of a young woman in an existential crisis.  It is a brilliant juxtaposition of the spiritual and the material.  It is incredibly suspenseful and part of that is due to the fact that I never knew what would happen from one moment to the next.  The atmospheric score only added to my unease.  Stewart gives the best performance of her career, in my opinion, and she is simply riveting.  It is definitely the best performance I've seen this year.  The scenes on the Eurostar where she receives a string of texts are intense, to say the least, and the final scene raised the hairs on the back of my neck.  I know that this film won't appeal to many moviegoers, especially those who don't like ambiguous endings, but I found it to be fascinating and I'm sure that I will be thinking about for many days to come.

T2 Trainspotting

Twenty years ago, in the cult classic movie Trainspotting (which I absolutely loved), Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) betrayed his three best friends and took the £16,000 that the four of them had stolen all for himself to start a new life.  In the voice-over he told the audience that he was a bad person but that was going to change.  Have you ever wondered if things really did change for him?  I liked Mark Renton as a character but I hoped, rather than believed, that he would overcome his heroin addiction and make something of himself.  I felt the same way when I went to see the sequel, T2 Trainspotting, last night.  I hoped, rather than believed, that it would be a good movie.  Although Renton is going through a divorce and the company he works for is downsizing, he has been clean for the past twenty years so he is doing much better than I expected.  He returns to Edinburgh after the death of his mother and is reunited with Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), who is now running his aunt's pub while engaging in a blackmail scheme with his Bulgarian girlfriend (Anjela Nedyalkova), Spud (Ewen Bremner), who is still addicted to heroin and estranged from Gail (Shirley Henderson) and his son Fergus, and Begbie (Robert Carlyle), who has recently escaped from prison.  The three of them are still bitter about Renton's betrayal and their interactions are highly amusing.  Like the first movie, there is an opportunity and a betrayal but there is also a twist so the story feels fresh but there are many nostalgic nods to the original for hard-core fans, including a new "Choose Life" speech, this time railing against social media rather than consumerism, a scene with a toilet (thankfully not as gross as the first movie), and a cameo by Kelly Macdonald, Renton's underage girlfriend who is now a lawyer.  The first movie explored the existential angst of young men who didn't see a future for themselves while this one centers on the cynicism of middle-aged men who now long for the past.  Once again Danny Boyle employs fast cuts, freeze frames, text on the screen, and pulse pounding music underneath the action and, while this seemed groundbreaking and mind-blowing in the first film, it seems a little tired in this one.  However, this movie, much like the fate of Renton, is a lot better than I expected!

A United Kingdom

Last night I went to see A United Kingdom and it was such a lovely and inspiring film!  It tells the true story of Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), the King of Bechuanaland when it was a British protectorate in the 1940s, and Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), the woman he met in London while studying law.  Not only is this a touching romance (they fell in love over a shared passion for jazz) but it is also a story of political intrigue.  At first the British government tries to prevent their marriage because South Africa, an important member of the Commonwealth due to their valuable resources needed by Britain, opposes it because of their policy of apartheid.  Later the government tries to remove Seretse as king in a stunning betrayal.  However, the strength of their love wins over Seretse's people as well as Ruth's family and eventually leads to the independence of present-day Botswana.  It is a film which will leave you cheering (and will make you hate the perfidy of Britain's colonial policies).  To be sure, the film is predictable (scenes with Ruth's parents disowning her and British bureaucrats plotting behind closed doors) but I was completely drawn into the love story between Seretse and Ruth.  Oyelowo and Pike give incredibly affecting performances and I had tears in my eyes several times, particularly when the women of Seretse's village sing to Ruth and when Seretse, with tears streaming down his face, gives a powerful speech about unifying Africa.  This film is visually stunning with scenes in London shrouded in fog and scenes in Africa suffused with an orange glow.  It has flaws but the love story is riveting and the message is powerful.

The Sense of an Ending

Last summer I read the best-selling novel The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and in my review I wrote that people would either love it or hate it.  I loved it and so I have been eagerly anticipating the film adaptation.  After seeing it last night, I have the same assessment of the film as I did of the novel.  It is definitely not for everyone but it is a poignant exploration of one man's life as he is forced to reexamine the past after receiving an unexpected letter.  Jim Broadbent is Tony Webster and Charlotte Rampling plays Veronica Ford, Tony's girlfriend at university.  Their story, as Tony remembers it, is told through a series of flashbacks, with Billy Howle and Freya Mavor playing the younger characters, as Tony recounts the story to his ex-wife (an amusing Harriet Walter).  Then their story, as it really happened, is revealed as Tony arranges a series of meetings with Veronica.  As he sheds his delusions about the kind of person he was and is, he begins to make amends with the people in his life, namely his ex-wife and pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery).  I really enjoyed this character study because I think that we all view our pasts the way we need to in order to validate our opinions of ourselves.  Jim Broadbent is marvelous (I think that his portrayal of Tony is much more sympathetic than the character is written on the page) and Charlotte Rampling, once again, gives a haunting performance.  I highly recommend this film but, because the mystery unfolds very slowly, I recognize that many might find it to be tedious.

Note:  My favorite line in the film comes when the young Tony goes home with Veronica to meet her parents.  Her mother asks him what he hopes to do with an undergraduate degree in English literature.  I laughed out loud...

My Life as a Zucchini

My Life as a Zucchini is a French stop-motion animation movie about a boy, nicknamed Zucchini, who is sent to a foster home after his alcoholic mother dies where he learns the true meaning of friendship.  This movie was screened at Sundance this year and several of my friends recommended it to me so I saw it last night.  Even though I had an almost visceral reaction to this movie I loved it so much!  It just might be my favorite movie of the year so far!  The subject is one that is very close to my heart.  Both my niece and nephew are adopted and they were both in foster homes before they came to my family so many of the scenes depicted in this film brought tears to my eyes, especially when one of the children says that there is no one left to love them and when another child runs out to see if her mother has come back for her every time someone visits.  It was difficult for me to see children in such distressing situations but I admire the filmmakers for tackling these issues in a way that feels authentic.  They are all wise beyond their years and they have been exposed to things that no child should ever have to deal with but they are, nevertheless, still children so their explanations for things, such as sex, are hilarious.  Despite the grim subject, there is quite a bit of humor in this film.  I absolutely loved the children and I thought they were all fully realized characters with distinct personalities (something to be commended as the film has such a short run time).  I was particularly touched by Simon, who initially comes across as a bully but has a few vulnerable moments.  I really enjoyed the relationships between the children and the love story between Zucchini and Camille is very sweet.  Finally, I really loved the quirky look of all of the characters.  They have oversize heads with large expressive eyes and red noses as if they are all perpetually suffering from a cold and this makes them incredibly sympathetic, in my opinion.  I cannot recommend this film enough!

Note:  I saw it in French with English subtitles but there is a dubbed version, as well.

The Red Turtle

Yesterday I decided to go to the Broadway to see the Academy Award nominated film The Red Turtle and I am so glad that I did!  It is absolutely brilliant with a simple yet profound narrative about life, love, and fate.  A man is washed ashore on an uninhabited island.  After discovering a plentiful supply of bamboo, he makes a raft and attempts to leave the island.  The raft is broken up by a red turtle not far from shore and the man is forced to return to the island.  After several more attempts with the same result, the man sees the red turtle wash up on shore and, in an act of revenge, he turns it upside down.  Feeling remorse the next day, he tries unsuccessfully to revive the turtle.  When the turtle's shell cracks, it is transformed into a beautiful woman.  Years go by and the man and woman eventually have a son with an unusual connection with turtles.  When their son decides to leave the island with a group of turtles, the couple remains to live out their lives in a series of beautiful vignettes.  After the man dies, the woman is, once again, transformed back into the red turtle and it slowly swims away from the island.  The story is incredibly beautiful and affecting and even though there is almost no dialogue (aside from a few exclamations) the characters are able to convey genuine emotion.  I also loved the distinct portrayal of the animals on the island.  My favorite "characters" are the crabs which become the man's constant companions in some amusing situations.  The animation is absolutely stunning and even the gray and sepia tones of the ocean in a storm are somehow vibrant.  I loved this film and I highly recommend it!

Note:  Speaking of Academy Awards, I am so glad that Moonlight won Best Picture.  It is such a beautiful film and I highly recommend it, too!

Fences

On New Year's Eve I went to see Fences, an adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.  Troy Maxson (Washington) is a sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh living with his wife Rose (Davis) and his son Cory (Jovan Adepo).  The fence he is perpetually building with his son becomes a metaphor for how trapped he feels and he lashes out against the people in his life.  Troy is a despicable character who does despicable things such as sabotaging his son's chance for a football scholarship because he is bitter about his own lost opportunity to play baseball, cheating on his wife and forcing her to take in his illegitimate daughter, and swindling his disabled brother (Mykelti Williamson) out of his war pension.  It was very difficult for me to watch Denzel Washington, an actor I have always liked and admired, play such an unsympathetic character but his performance is brilliant.  The same could be said of Viola Davis.  I had difficulty with her character, as well, because, although she confronts her husband about his behavior (in an incredibly powerful scene which, no doubt, secured her the Golden Globe), she becomes his apologist after his death.  In the end it is a movie about a flawed man who ultimately gets redemption for hurting the people in his life because he himself has been hurt.  I didn't like this resolution because, in my opinion, he doesn't deserve redemption.   Despite the lauded performances of Washington and Davis, it's not a movie I would recommend.

Collateral Beauty

On Wednesday night during winter break, I went with my sister to see Collateral Beauty (why, yes, that was my third movie of the day!).  This movie has been much maligned by critics but both Marilyn and I enjoyed it.  Howard Inlet (Will Smith) is a New York ad executive who credits three abstractions for his success:  love, because everyone needs it; time, because everyone wants more of it; and death, because everyone fears it.  After the tragic death of his young daughter, he retreats from the world and begins writing letters to these abstractions.  His colleagues Whit Yardsham (Edward Norton), Claire Wilson (Kate Winslet), and Simon Scott (Michael Pena), worried that his behavior is costing them clients, hire three unemployed actors to personify these abstractions.  Aimee (Keira Knightley), Raffi (Jacob Latimore), and Brigitte (Helen Mirren) portray Love, Time, and Death, respectively, and not only bring peace to Howard, but help Whit, who is struggling with his relationship with his estranged daughter; Claire, who laments the fact that she has spent all of her time focused on her career rather than starting a family; and Simon, who is battling terminal cancer.  One of the reasons I loved Manchester by the Sea, which also deals with the loss of a child, is that the grief is not magically abated at the end of the movie for a happy ending as it is in Collateral Beauty.  However, while the final scenes are contrived, they are also quite affecting and they did bring tears to my eyes (Marilyn was a blubbering mess).  I really enjoyed all of the performances, especially Mirren who was incredibly funny.  I recommend that you see Collateral Beauty for a feel-good movie to lift your spirits (but see Manchester by the Sea for a gritty and honest portrayal of grief).

Nocturnal Animals

The second half of my double-feature was the strangely compelling psychological thriller Nocturnal Animals.  Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a successful, but profoundly unhappy, Los Angeles gallery owner.  She receives a copy of a novel written by her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) and slowly becomes obsessed with it.  This film has a story-within-a-story as the novel is acted out as Susan reads it.  In the novel, Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), along with his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and daughter India (Ellie Bamber), is hijacked by a gang of thugs, led by Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), on a remote road in the West Texas desert.  His wife and daughter are forced into the gang's car and are eventually raped and murdered.  Tony works with Lt. Bobby Anders (Michael Shannon) to find the culprits but there is not enough evidence to convict them so they end up meting out their own kind of justice.  Because the novel is dedicated to her, Susan believes that Edward wrote it for revenge because she left him for another man and aborted their unborn child.  She is also strangely attracted to Edward again but, like the character of Tony, Edward ultimately gets his revenge.  This is film-noir at its best with lots of Hitchcockian moments which kept me on the edge of my seat.  To be sure, it is quite strange (the opening alone may be off-putting to many) but I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.  Adams, Gyllenhaal, Shannon, and Taylor-Johnson (who is nominated for a Golden Globe) give outstanding performances and Tom Ford's direction is visually stunning.  I highly recommend it (but it is weird).

Moonlight

Last Wednesday I spent the day at the Tower theater, a small art house theater in the ninth and ninth district of SLC, for another double-feature of films garnering Oscar buzz.  I began with Moonlight, an achingly beautiful coming of age film about a boy searching for his identity in modern-day Miami.  The film explores three pivotal moments in the life of Chiron, beginning when he is a shy and withdrawn child (Alex Hibbert) known as "Little."  His mother (the brilliant Naomie Harris) is a crack addict and he is bullied at school when he is befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali) who tells him that he gets to decide what kind of life he will have.  Little spends more and more time with Juan, viewing him as a mentor, until he learns that Juan is a drug dealer who supplies his mother.  Next, we see the teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders) who is the target of a particularly cruel bully at school and an increasingly abusive mother.  He becomes friends with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) and they become intimate.  Kevin betrays Chiron when he is forced to beat him in a hazing incident.  Finally, the adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes), now known as "Black," is a tough, hardened, and disillusioned drug-dealer.  In an incredibly poignant scene, he makes peace with his mother who is in rehab and reunites with Kevin (Andre Holland).  It is a difficult film to watch but it does end with hope for Chiron.  I was particularly struck by Hibbert's portrayal of Little Chiron, especially the scene where he boils water by himself to take a bath.  It was heartbreaking for me to watch Little Chiron because he reminded me so much of Sean when he was little.  I loved this beautiful film and I highly recommend it.  However, the subject matter might be difficult for some.

Lion

Another film that is getting a lot of Oscar buzz is Lion so I saw it after the screening of Jackie in a double-feature (I love spending the day at the Broadway).  This film tells the incredible true story of one boy's journey to find his home.  Five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) accompanies his older brother to look for work but falls asleep on a bench in a train station.  His brother leaves him there telling him that he will be back for him soon.  Saroo gets on a train hoping for a more comfortable place to sleep but the train begins moving with him trapped inside.  The train stops in Calcutta, thousands of miles from home, where Saroo wanders the streets for months before being adopted by an affluent Australian couple (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman).  Twenty years later Saroo (Dev Patel) embarks on a course in restaurant management and meets a group of Indian students who spark his meager childhood memories.  He becomes obsessed with finding his family by using Google Earth.  I love the scene where he finally finds his village and, as he uses the satellite to view the streets, there are flashbacks of him as a child running along those same streets.  I also love the very poignant scene between Patel and Kidman when Saroo tells his adopted mother that he has been searching for his birth mother (made even more affecting by the fact that Kidman is an adoptive mother herself).  I did find Rooney Mara's role as Saroo's girlfriend to be rather superfluous.  She breaks up with him when his search becomes obsessive and has a tearful moment with him when he finds his family but she doesn't do much else to advance the plot.  There is the predictable reunion scene between Saroo and his mother followed by actual footage of the real-life Saroo with both his mothers but I found these moments to be very well done and incredibly heart-warming.  I really enjoyed this film and I highly recommend it.

Note:  Throughout the entire film, I kept wondering why it was called Lion.  When the reason was explained in the epilogue, it brought spontaneous tears to my eyes.

Jackie

I love this time of year because this is the time when the Broadway screens all of the films generating Oscar buzz.  No one is getting more buzz than Natalie Portman for her performance in Jackie so this film was high on my list to see over winter break.  It follows Jackie Kennedy (Portman) in the days after her husband's assassination through flashbacks during an interview given to Theodore White (Billy Crudup) for Life magazine.  We see Jackie during the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Dallas, witnessing the oath of office administered to Lyndon Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) aboard Air Force One, telling the children about their father's death, making preparations for the funeral, and leaving the White House after her efforts to restore it.  Through it all, Jackie expresses her profound grief and demands that JFK's legacy be protected.  Portman gives the performance of her career and I literally could not take my eyes off her. She physically resembles Jackie Kennedy but it is the voice which sells the performance, particularly during the filming of the White House tour.  I was also struck by the scene between Jackie and a priest (John Hurt) where she discusses JFK's infidelities and the scene where she drunkenly relives her shining moments in the White House by going to each room in the clothing she wore for those occasions.  The score by Mica Levi is incredibly stirring but it is the use of the music from the Broadway musical Camelot that is especially dramatic.  I highly recommend this film for Portman's brilliant portrayal of the enigmatic former First Lady.

La La Land

Last night I was, once again, at the Broadway Theater downtown.  This time I saw a film that I have been looking forward to for months and it was as good as I was hoping it would be!  La La Land is an homage to the classic old Hollywood musical (director Damien Chazelle was inspired by Singin' in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) but it is set in modern-day Los Angeles and it tells a very contemporary story.  Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz musician who dreams of owning his own club.  They meet and spend an idyllic summer together full of singing, dancing, and old-fashioned romance.  They both struggle to achieve their dreams but will they choose success or love?  After they make their choice, we get to see what their lives are like five years later but, in an incredibly clever sequence, we also get to see what their lives would have been like had they made a different choice.  Oh, how I loved this movie!  It is charming, delightful, and magical with wonderfully engaging performances by both Gosling and Stone, made even more impressive by the fact that neither of them are known for singing and dancing (Gosling learned to tap and play piano for the role).  The choreography is spectacular (it was choreographed by Mandy Moore, who is most noted for her work on So You Think You Can Dance), especially in "A Lovely Night" shot in the Hollywood Hills at sunset, and I loved the music so much I downloaded "City of Stars" before the final credits ended.  I cannot recommend this movie enough!  It put a smile on my face at I time when I have become a bit jaded about life.