We’ve watched a number of movies that we enjoyed recently. The most recent was Tully, starring Charlize Theron as a mother struggling with a newborn and a son who is probably somewhere on the spectrum, although he isn’t officially diagnosed, plus another daughter. See this one without reading anything about it. The less you know in advance, the more you’re likely to enjoy it. Theron is impressive in an unglamorous role in which she is called upon to be brash and sarcastic on a regular basis. There is the requisite “didn’t see that coming” moment late in the game.
I finally got around to seeing Thor: Ragnarok on the weekend. I’m still working on my MCU movie catch-up, but this one was a decent entry. A cheeky sense of humor. Especially liked the scenes between Thor and Doctor Strange, and Jeff Goldblum was a hoot. The director voiced one of the funnier minor characters with a full-on antipodean accent.
We also saw Like Father, the new release on Netflix starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic bride-to-be and Kelsey Grammer as her long-estranged father. Improbably, they end up on a week-long cruise together in one of the honeymoon suites while they attempt to ignore each other (at first) and get past their long-standing issues. Lots of cute scenes, and it’s a low-risk film, a rom-com without the rom, really. Seth Rogan plays an awkward Canadian divorcé, and his wife directed the movie. It has the hugest and most pervasive instance of product placement of which I’m aware: the Royal Caribbean cruise ship that is almost a character. Not a very demanding film, but we liked it well enough.
Final Portrait is a Geoffrey Rush showcase written and directed by Stanley Tucci. Rush plays real-life tortured artist Alberto Giacometti, who asks a friend (played by Armie Hammer) to pose for a portrait at his Paris atelier. It’s only supposed to take a couple of hours, but it stretches into days and then weeks, with Giacometti occasionally painting over much of what he’s accomplished in a fit of pique and artistic melodrama. Rush throws himself into the role and at first you wonder whether he’d be an interesting person to know but later you’d probably decide he’d be tedious to be around. He was a conspicuous philanderer, to boot. The big question is why the friend, James Lord, would put up with Giacometti’s behavior for so long, especially when he had pressing business in America. Tony Shalhoub (Monk) is almost unrecognizable as Giacometti’s brother, who has seen this all before. It’s a rare dramatic turn for him, and he’s quite good in it.
I was surprised by Red Sparrow, the Jennifer Lawrence Soviet spy thriller. Based on trailers from back when it was first released, I expected her to be more of a femme fatale. Instead, it turns out she was forced into the sparrow program by her lascivious uncle. There is a decent amount of ambiguity to the story: which side is she really playing, and is she an agent, a double agent, a treble agent or what? We enjoyed the unexpected turn of events at the end. Also stars Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker (briefly, as a ditzy and drunken US politician), and Jeremy Irons. It took a critical drubbing, but it wasn’t as bad as we were led to believe it might be.
We also saw The Leisure Seeker, with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as a couple of a certain age. She decides to dust off the old Winnebago (which bears the same nickname as the film) for one last long vacation trek with her husband, who has dementia. Her goal is the Florida Keys, because Sutherland was a big fan of Hemingway. They have numerous adventures along the way, and Sutherland’s character swims in and out of awareness. He’s well enough to drive (if she gives directions), but a lot of the time he doesn’t know where they are or, indeed who they are. Mirren’s character is frustrated when he suddenly recognizes a student he had many years ago, everything about her, but then a few minutes later can’t recall their children’s names. It’s a poignant film about a difficult situation that has an ending you might see coming…or maybe not. Two great actors doing their best with a road movie for the ages.
On the TV front, I watched La Forêt (The Forest) on Netflix, a French crime series that reminded me a little of Broadchurch. The local police gets a new boss on the same day that a teenage girl goes missing. The disappearance calls to mind a similar incident from a decade earlier when two girls went missing. All the signs point toward the culprit being someone from the village, which makes long-time friends and acquaintances suddenly suspicious and wary of each other. There is a vaguely supernatural air to the story, which also involves a French teacher who was a foundling who may have lived in a cave in the woods for some prolonged stretch when she was six or seven years old. Not quite as well done as Broadchurch, but I enjoyed it, and it’s a breezy six episodes.
I also saw The Rain, a Danish series that starts off with a misguided scientist seeding rainclouds with a virus that he thinks will “fix” humanity. Instead, it kills off almost everyone. His two children, a teenage daughter and her younger brother, spend years in a bunker until they’re forced to emerge, where they join up with a group of other young people. The rain is still deadly, so they have to take cover every time the clouds grow dark, and there are various groups of people they need to be wary of, including paramilitary guys in armed vehicles scooping up survivors in search of someone who might be immune. There are some real surprises from episode to episode, the individual characters have interesting back-stories and it’s definitely open for a second season. I liked it a lot.
