Reviews

The good: 1. Lily James plays Ellie. I loved her spicy Cousin Rose in Downton Abbey and her spunky good ol' girl waitress in Baby Driver. She has become a young actress I look forward to seeing. She gives an appealing performance as an underappreciated woman. But pray tell, why does the lead character, Jack, underappreciate her for so many years (besides being a sad sack)? 2. The Beatles music is fun to hear, even though not performed (mostly) by the Beatles. The music playing over the closing credits is perfect. 3. Toward the end there is a charming scene set at a slightly dilapidated house near the water. To say more would be to say too much. 4. Funny character work by Kate McKinnon, who has the best comic eyes since John Belushi. But see the quibble below. 5. Ed Sheeran shuffles through the movie playing himself. He is amiable and self-deprecating and likeable. 6. The use of Google searches is amusing. (Some of us pray to God for guidance, but we all get answers from Google.) My quibbles: 1. Himesh Patel, who plays Jack, isn't a great singer. He misses notes.In a movie about an aspiring musician getting famous singing Beatles songs, shouldn't the actor be able to do them justice. (I assume he sang for himself. Where is Marni Nixon when you really need her? Or Auto-Tune?) 2. The film raises some serious issues-happiness and art and conscience and the corrupting influence of fame and money-but falls flat. There's no emotional heft in the climactic moment of crisis and redemption. 3. Dental problems. For a time, the lead actor wears an off-putting dental prosthesis. It's both gross and obviously fake. How does that improve the movie? 4. Beatles music remains popular, but the band and the music and the innovation are inseparable from the cultural context of the 1960s. If The Beatles came along now, would they even get played on the radio? Music which felt fresh and innovative and a little dangerous in 1967 has become foundational to much of popular music today. Indeed, if a classic Beatles tune were released for the first time today, it might seem a bit old-fashioned. The movie simply assumes that songs written in the mid-1960s would have instant astonishing immediate popularity 65 year later. But would they? A question worth pondering. The movie, however, doesn't give it a second thought. 5. The worldwide blackout that destroys almost all memory of The Beatles is never explained, It's as if the filmmaker is saying: Move on, moviegoer, nothing to explain here. But that means the blackout is a deus ex machina of the most shamelessly contrived sort. 6. In one scene, Jack is overjoyed to meet an older man and woman-never mind why. But then he lets them leave without even getting their phone numbers. Did I miss something? Wouldn't he be desperate to see them again? They are, so far as he knows, the only two people in the world who understand him and to whom he can talk. 7. Kate McKinnon is funny, but it's a stock character, the fast-talking overbearing anything-for-a buck soul-deadening leach of a manager. She could have been the film's villain, which it needed, but she never moves the character past comic caricature. She succeeds at comedy but fails at villainy. 8. The big climax leaves behind questions for the world to ponder that can't be answered. I can't say more. But how do those massive unanswered questions affect Jack's life? The final scene doesn't logically follow or resolve the huge questions, and so leaves us hanging. If you want a lightweight movie with Beatles music, a movie that doesn't place demands on its audience or itself, and you don't mind shaggy logic and loose plotting and maddening loose ends, give it a try. You could do worse. It's hot out there, and the theater is air conditioned.

Aaron Sorkin is a terrific screenwriter with a terrible tendency to burn holes in his script.

Sorkin's scripts are full of words, interesting words, witty words, humorous words. He has good ideas and a genius for working them into a great story. So far, so good.

But his flaw, his weakness, is that he can't resist moral preening. The central character is given dramatic license to be morally superior, and to tell you about it. By extension, the movie's point of view, and that of the filmmaker, are virtuous. (Sorkin wrote and directed.)

This is no small flaw--the preachiness which is invited in by lack of moral ambiguity reduces the film's complexity down to simpleminded virtue-peddling. Here is how right-thinking people are required to behave, even against self interest.

This shows up in the Molly character in two ways. After she sets up extremely high-stakes poke games among the very rich, she repeatedly becomes counselor, social worker, and big sister to the players.. I didn't buy it. I don't know anything about the real Molly Bloom, but I'm pretty sure that a woman who goes into the business of hosting high stakes poker games isn't Mother Theresa. (The movie does admit a flaw in the woman's conduct, but soft-sells it. It-s not a flaw you see, but only a natural and forgivable response to her circumstances.) I could have done without the effort to turn the character into Mary Poppins.

The other example of moral preening comes with decisions made by the character at the end of the movie. No spoilers here. Again, though, high moral conduct beats self-interest.

This unfortunate tendency by Mr. Sorkin is a form of self-sabotage. An example: The American President, a charming first-half movie ruined by screeching political right-think in the second.

Sorkin also likes the Big Dramatic Showy Scene. He's got one here, and it feels a bit unjustified by the rest of the movie. Again, late in the movies, no spoiler.

I've hit the negative. It has its good points, too. If you see it, you might want to bone up on poker terminology.

I wanted this movie to be great. It wasn't. The performance by Frances McDormand is good but not great. She's very good at showing overwhelming anger, but that's all she's allowed. Her character never gets the chance to breathe. Blame the script, not her--she's a terrific actor, but this is a one-note performance.

2. There is a sub-theme about race. Race is an important issue and deserves to be treated honestly, but in this movie, it felt like a side-road that led nowhere. (It actually feels like moral preening on the part of the scriptwriter. It didn't add much to the movie's meaning.

3. Wonderful performances by Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell as a police chief and officer. Woody especially brought grace to a character who at first seemed unsympathetic. (BTW, McDormand's ex-husband has a young and beautiful girlfriend, and that relationship is treated as awkward and shameful. Harrelson's wife is young and beautiful, and that relationship is treated as idyllic.)

4. Police officers don't talk like that among themselves or to others.

5. I particularly didn't like the Chief's take on racist cops, saying essentially that all cops are racist. That may be accepted as dogma by some Hollywood screenwriters, but any chief who talks about his beloved employees--or cops in general--like that shouldn't be a cop. Coming from this character, the sentiment is cheap and clunky and inexplicable.

6. There are a couple of plot holes wide enough to drive a billboard through sideways. The most egregious (no spoiler here) is what happens (actually what should have happened but didn't) immediately following the window scene. (You'll know the scene when you see it.) The thing not happening was necessary keep the plot going. Everything that happened after that feels tainted as artificial and contrived. Likewise a later scene in a bar, involving a coincidence beyond coincidence.

7. It's impossible McDormand's character wouldn't have been arrested several times in the course of the movie, for several serious crimes. Once again, he plot depends on that not happening, and thus the plot again is contrived.

8. There's a letter delivered to Rockwell's character late in the movie which is full of Hallmark Card sentimental drivel. It can't be justified by either what we know of that character or what we know of the writer.

In a world (as the movie trailers used to say) where we are awash in numbskull comic book movies and incoherent special effects spectacles, it was a small miracle this film even came to my local cinema. Too bad I couldn't love it.

What a delight to go to a summer movie that isn't based on a comic book, doesn't have incomprehensible computer-generated action sequences, and doesn't feature cartoon--or cartoonish--characters. This is a movie about real people with real problems, produced for grownups. It is a movie that resonates in your mind long after you walk out of the theater.

Kate Blanchett's Jasmine was formerly married to Alec Baldwin's Hal, an amoral financial adviser, defrauder, and destroyer. Her privileged but empty lifestyle evaporates after he is arrested and their assets are seized. Destitute but still haughty, she travels to San Francisco to live with her blue collar sister, whose own marriage was ruined by a failed investment with Hal. Jasmine is being rescued by her sister but that does not prevent Jasmine from looking down her nose. Jasmine and Hal's reign of arrogant financial destruction is told bit by bit in multiple flashbacks.

Kate Blanchett is impeccable as a woman who is either indifferent to her husband's financial malfeasance (other than enjoying the sumptuous lifestyle) or deeply complicit. Jasmine is vain, fragile, greedy, needy, egotistical, the sad remains of a shattered ego, horrific, and even a little bit sympathetic on the deepest human level.

Every character is exceedingly well cast. Alec Baldwin, who could have swaggered through the role of Hal, pulled back and let us see through the smile to the emptiness of his soul. Without mentioning every character--and there's not a single false note by any actor--can anyone who remembers Andrew Dice Clay from his heyday imagine him as a sympathetic character?

This was a superb effort by writer-director Woody Allen. Go see it. Ignore the sound of car chases seeping in from the other theaters. A rare summer treat.

This weekly half-hour was the spiritual predecessor of Weekend Update. The English version had the reputation of being daringly topical and incisive. The American version was, in the well chosen word from the review by cmndrnineveh, smug. Maybe it was simply impossible, in the year after JFK's death, to make fun of the dominant ideology of the time, carried forward by JFK's then-overwhelmingly popular successor and associated with the martyred president. Of course, the sting of satire is most needed when smug assumptions rule political and social discourse. This program, however, often seemed intent on comforting the comfortable. Could a prime time network program slip daggers into the New Frontier and the Great Society in 1964? Not bloody likely.

One saving grace: The great Tom Lehrer wrote some songs for the show which were as keen and merciless as an Hattori Hanzo sword. They were collected in an album called "That Was the Year That Was," which is, I think, still available. Although topically tied to 1964/1965, the songs still cut. If you enjoy satire and you don't know Mr. Lehrer, do yourself a favor.

Oh, I also had a thing for Nancy Ames.

One of the most beautiful movies ever made deserves a Blu-Ray release. I first saw "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" a few years ago on cable with a dinosaur CRT television, and even in that format it glowed. I want to buy the disc, but I'm holding out for Blu-Ray.

The movie is stunning in every way. I can imagine a couple of female friends sharing a bottle of wine and a box of Kleenex and having a good, purifying cry. It is everything that a filmed romance should be, an amazing sung story of lost love, with a poignant ending that is--depending on your viewpoint--sweetly happy or deliciously sad.

If you haven't seen it yet, don't wait--see it now on DVD. Those of us who have already seen it will patiently await the Blu-Ray.

I don't know what made me think of Billy Jack and look it up on IMDb. Maybe in old age I'm looking back with fondness on the things of my youth that I despised. It's been forty years since I saw "Billy Jack," so be kind if I get a detail or two wrong.

A girl dragged me to see Billy Jack in a second-run theater. It'd been around the block once. (The movie, not the girl, who'd been around the block several times.) I think my female friend sensed that I was a little too conservative and judgmental and this was a movie I *needed* to see. In the end she was disappointed it had no discernible salutary effect on me other than to harden my stance against idiotic peace-and-love schlock.

Billy Jack fights violence by beating up people. Not exactly what Mr. Gandhi and Dr. King had in mind. We cheer for Billy (or Jack) while he lands crushing martial arts blows to (if memory serves) Republicans, rednecks, law enforcement officers, greedy land speculators, the anti-child lobby, and people who like their cars. Mr. Jack loves children, but probably not in an icky way, and is full of woo-woo mysticism which, as I recall, was often in those days linked to the use of pharmaceuticals. The Man, of course, is always trying to keep him down.

One previous review said the movie leans to the left. This movie leans to the left like the sun leans to hot. This movie is so socialist that by comparison it makes Obama's preacher look like Rick Santorum.

If pretentiousness and smug piety count against a movie at all (and they should, even making allowances for a film from the counterculture years), this is one of the worst ever. As I think about it, I'd kind of like to see it again, just for laughs.

To those who love "Billy Jack" and its message of peace, love, and harmony: If this review angers you, please don't beat me up. To misquote the song: Peace on earth/Is all I say.

I disagree that this is the definitive Lincoln. Massey is like one of Disney's Audioanimatrons. I agree with one corespondent that Henry Fonda's performance as Lincoln tended to lapse into a trance. Same with other Fonda roles, which is one reason he's not my favorite actor. Both actors seem to have been overwhelmed by history and thus Lincoln comes out as an icon, not as a human. There was a miniseries with Hal Holbrook some years ago that gave us a more human Lincoln.

Whatever actor or studio manages the perfect Lincoln ought to do us a favor and have him deliver both the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, even if it doesn't fit into the movie. Send the clips around to schools. Would love to see the greatness of those speeches matched to a great performance.

Not a great movie, but wonderful in many ways, especially the performance by Jeff Bridges. I liked the vast scruffiness of the landscape. Also this is the rare Coen Bros. movie with human warmth. (Although the other movies generally don't suffer for their chilliness, except for "The Hudsucker Proxy.") I wasn't all in for the performance by Hailee Steinfeld. She's beautiful, and did well enough, except that I thought the portrayal could have been more stern and rigorous. The Mattie Ross character works much of her comedy playing against an Old Testament determination for vengeance that seemed softened in this movie. She seemed too warm and cuddly, especially toward the end. Don't know if that was the director's choice, or the actor's.

It's not the amiable performance of Dick Van Dyke, emerging as a star.

It's not the fresh-from-the-shower Janet Leigh as Rosie.

It's not the pretty good Broadway score.

It's not the always-funny Paul Lynde, leering and lavender, an unlikely mouthpiece for the eternal frustrations of fatherhood. (Kids! I don't know what's wrong with these kids today!)

It's certainly not the hokey and unconvincing and undangerous Elvis/Conway Twitty rock'n'roller who looks like he just came from a gig at the used car lot.

And it's not the silly subplots involving Russians and amphetamines and Ed Sullivan (although nice to see the wooden, totemic variety show host reanimated again.)

It is, of course, Ann-Margaret, impossibly young and beautiful.

But let's be more specific. It is not her sinfully delicious performance generally.

It is this: Ann-Margaret, alone before a backdrop, singing the theme at the very beginning and end of the movie. It is Ann Margaret fired up with sensual energy and burning through a song that is not inherently sexy.

Oh, Lord: righteous.

I was 13. I saw the movie, but *experienced* Ann-Margaret's opening and closing.

I've never recovered.

Never has there been a more generous and humane movie.

It has been said that this this movie (gently, indirectly) attacked blacklisting. That may be so, but there is nothing didactic or political in it. This is first and foremost a love story and comedy, with dramatic tension provided by Hume Cronyn's wonderfully weaselly Professor Elwell (Elwell=Ill Will?), who is out to ruin Cary Grant's Dr. Praetorius.

Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain together give a luminous portrait of a couple falling in love. His acceptance of her, even though when they meet she is pregnant out of wedlock (very sticky in 1951), is complemented by her willingness to finally accept his love and move past her fear that Grant's feelings are pity more than love.

The climactic scene--an inquisition orchestrated by the narrow and spiteful Elwell--is a masterpiece, solving with an hilariously unlikely narrative the mystery of Mr. Shunderson, Praetorius's manservant.

One more thing: the grand and joyful Academic Festival Overture, conducted by Praetorus.

This movie is one of those which shows what we've lost in this era of car chases, CGI, and gross-out farce.