What movie did YOU just FINISH watching?

I love this movie. This is a different take on the time loop theme. It is a comedy, many very funny scenes. Great energetic performances by Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, and J.K. Simmons.

Harrowing true life account of three aboriginal children forcibly taken from their homes and placed in a re-education camp to be trained as domestics for wealthy English families. After a daring escape, they set out to walk the 1,500 miles to their home, while eluding authorities and using the rabbit proof fence as their guide.

The children were non actors who answered the casting call. Although many of the more difficult scenes were accomplished with some slight of hand, their lack of experience adds a measure of authenticity that you might not get with professionals.

A beautiful testament to the undying strength of the human spirit (DVD jacket)
     

The Man with the Iron Heart (2017).

I don't know if this will make sense, but could it be that Love Me Tonight is just a bit too clever - to calculated - for it's own good? It certainly has its share of delicious moments, but I've had a similar reaction: "This is great stuff, so well done...why am I not more charmed by it?" And I even like Chevalier, although I admit he became an acquired taste. Perhaps the difference between Lubitsch and Mamoulian is that Lubitsch never let the machinery show. Know what I mean?

And while you're pondering it, could you go for a doctor? 

Oh, yes: interns. Right now, though, I need a punctuation doctor; I was sure I deleted that inadvertent apostrophe from "it's." Nerts. I hate making mistakes like those.

But no worries about expressing your thoughts; your second paragraph puts the escargot handily into the garlic-butter sauce (so much for my trying to match you for Franco-phores). And about that "imp..." word: I wouldn't worry about that, either. It probably isn't pertinent to the topic. 







 

Café Society (2016, dir. Woody Allen).



As I’ve written before here, I’m a big Woody Allen fan—especially late, elegiac Woody Allen. Café Society is minor late Allen, but it’s still sweet and charming and passionately in love with the past. It’s just not as good as Midnight in Paris or A Rainy Day in New York or even Magic in the Moonlight.

The biggest problem is a lack of good lines—unbelievable, I know. There are, of course, some good lines here, but the movie is just not very funny for most of its running time.

Related to that is a weakness in the performances. All of the supporting players are delightful, notably Parker Posey and Paul Schneider as socialite friends who fix Jesse Eisenberg’s character up with jobs and relationships. Blake Lively is period-perfect and at her loveliest in a thankless part.

But the main players—oof. Eisenberg is fine, especially in the second half when his character represses the nebbishness. Steve Carell is bad, no two ways about it—and I like Carell! But here I found his line readings surprisingly terrible, as if—after five years—he couldn’t shake Michael Scott and eventually gave up trying. And Kristen Stewart is very pretty, of course, but she never gives any indication why two men would fall head over heels with her. Lively is perhaps even prettier, and she’s, well, a million times livelier.

Funnily enough, if A Rainy Day in New York is a stealth adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, Café Society is jam-packed with Great Gatsby parallels. Now, I love Gatsby and hate Catcher—but perhaps it’s because Catcher is such weak source material that Allen’s unfaithful pseudo-adaptation works so well, and perhaps it’s because Gatsby is so major that Café Society is ultimately so minor. Kristen Stewart, alas, is simply not enough of a believable Daisy Buchanan.

That may all seem more negative than I genuinely feel. The movie is not bad, just not as good as we know Allen is capable of.

Trial and Error (1997, dir. Jonathan Lynn).



Director Jonathan Lynn also helmed My Cousin Vinny (1992), and in many ways this flick is Vinny’s spiritual sequel. It isn’t nearly as good as Vinny, which is a masterpiece of script construction (by Dale Launer, whose brilliant dialogue is sorely missed here) and is legally accurate in nearly every respect, but it doesn’t deserve its consignment to virtual oblivion.

For one thing, it feels like a genuine movie, not an extended episode of a sitcom (as some critics charged at the time). The shots are nicely composed, the characters are all human, not one-note. (Roger Ebert pointed out that Charlize Theron—gorgeous and instantly lovable—looks both ways across the street when running to meet her beloved Jeff Daniels.) Kramer Michael Richards is a hoot, especially in the court scenes and when playing off the lovely Jessica Steen.

Trial and Error is not an object lesson in construction: Some elements go nowhere fast, some are too clichéd, some jokes are too broad and too silly. And—except for Rip Torn’s hilariously tearful monologue at the end—it lacks anything close to Dale Launer’s ingenious original phrasings (e.g., “dead-on-balls accurate”).

But this is still an always fun and frequently funny little movie. It’s not the classic that Vinny is, but it should be better known.