Monthly culture: April 2022
Friday, May 20th, 2022 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth07APR22: Our Souls at Night (Batra, 2017) (Netflix)
Jane Fonda and Robert Redford proving that people over 40 can be cast in movies, as long as they are already very famous. This film, from a novel by Kent Haruf, is the story of a widow, Addie, and a widower, Louis, who have been neighbours for years but become friends by sleeping in the same bed, to stave off the loneliness they feel at night. (This is all comfortable and platonic, until sex gets in the way). There's a lot of tentative non-sexual intimacy as they talk in the dark. Then Addie's son Gene turns up with his son, Jamie: Gene is estranged from his wife, Addie and Louis get to form a kind of family unit with Jamie and the dog they buy for him. But when push comes to shove, family comes first, and Addie and Louis no longer spend their nights together. I found this surprisingly moving and very engaging -- I was so angry at Gene for the way he manipulated and guilt-tripped his mother.
Of course none of this would have happened if either Louis or Addie had been a keen reader (I don't think we ever saw books anywhere) or if there had been a cat in one or both houses. Or even a dog, I suppose. A rich inner life and a small, needy predator do a great deal to keep loneliness at bay.
16APR22: Much Ado About Nothing (RSC / Shakespeare) (BBC iPlayer)
Afro-futurist production, new this year and very beautiful. Mostly gender-switched; spectacular costumes and hair, and excellent music; somewhat spoilt, for me, by hyperactive camera (we do not need a series of close-ups during an ensemble dance scene!) I think this would have been marvellous live, if occasionally a bit overacted. On the other hand, they had to compete with a lot of shiny things for attention ....
21APR22: Apollo 10½: A Space-Age Childhood Linklater, 2022) (Netflix)
A delightful surprise: an animated / rotoscoped film set in 1969 in Texas, against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Our protagonist is Stanley, who's about ten, and is the youngest of a large brood of siblings. His father works at NASA, and maybe that's why Stanley is recruited by two mysterious men in black, who need someone smaller than an adult for a test voyage to the moon.
Yes, it is possible that not everything in this movie is 100% factual. But it's so marvellously evocative of the era: audio bites of Janis Joplin, of the JFK speech that started it all, of Arthur C Clarke; over-chlorinated pools, everybody smoking, prank phone calls, Monkees records, corporal punishment ... Though only one of the virtual film group grew up in America, we all recognised so much from our childhoods.
Beautifully made, too: sometimes the blurriness of home cinematography, sometimes the Kodachrome colours of old photographs. And the soundtrack was brilliant, Sixties greats from start to finish.
The 'secret moon mission' story, which seemed just a child's fantasy to begin with, became a metaphor for Stanley's sense of being the odd one out (he's not in most of the family photos because he's the youngest), the one without agency. The moon is a lonely place, too.
Great examination of childhood and how the mundane and insignificant interacts with great changes in the wider world.
Quote from the virtual film club: "has anyone under fifty managed to watch this film to the end?"
23APR22: The Adam Project (Levy, 2022) (Netflix)
In which time pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) travels back to 2022 and teams up with his younger self (Walker Scobell, debut role, excellent screen chemistry with Reynolds). Adam1 wants to save his wife Laura (Zoe Saldanaaaaaaa) and also change the future, which was / will be horrid. They work with Adam's father (Mark Ruffalo) who is, of course, a brilliant quantum physicist. There are some special effects. Not everyone gets to go home.
That all makes it sound very facile, which is ... not incorrect. But it has heart, and some clever plotting, and better time-travel explanations than the MCU, and a myriad references to genre: Back to the Future, Face/Off, Last Starfighter, Star Wars etc etc. I had not realised when watching that Levy and Reynolds also collaborated on Free Guy, another fun and frivolous science fiction movie with heart that I enjoyed much more than I'd anticipated.
Initially Tom Cruise was slated to play the title role (older version, at least). We dodged a bullet there. The humour is what makes this film effective: without Reynolds or someone his comic equivalent, this would have been very gloomy.
Also several strong female roles: Adam's mother (Jennifer Garner), Laura (ZOE! SALDANAAAA!), and the uber-villain (Catherine Keener).
Jane Fonda and Robert Redford proving that people over 40 can be cast in movies, as long as they are already very famous. This film, from a novel by Kent Haruf, is the story of a widow, Addie, and a widower, Louis, who have been neighbours for years but become friends by sleeping in the same bed, to stave off the loneliness they feel at night. (This is all comfortable and platonic, until sex gets in the way). There's a lot of tentative non-sexual intimacy as they talk in the dark. Then Addie's son Gene turns up with his son, Jamie: Gene is estranged from his wife, Addie and Louis get to form a kind of family unit with Jamie and the dog they buy for him. But when push comes to shove, family comes first, and Addie and Louis no longer spend their nights together. I found this surprisingly moving and very engaging -- I was so angry at Gene for the way he manipulated and guilt-tripped his mother.
Of course none of this would have happened if either Louis or Addie had been a keen reader (I don't think we ever saw books anywhere) or if there had been a cat in one or both houses. Or even a dog, I suppose. A rich inner life and a small, needy predator do a great deal to keep loneliness at bay.
16APR22: Much Ado About Nothing (RSC / Shakespeare) (BBC iPlayer)
Afro-futurist production, new this year and very beautiful. Mostly gender-switched; spectacular costumes and hair, and excellent music; somewhat spoilt, for me, by hyperactive camera (we do not need a series of close-ups during an ensemble dance scene!) I think this would have been marvellous live, if occasionally a bit overacted. On the other hand, they had to compete with a lot of shiny things for attention ....
21APR22: Apollo 10½: A Space-Age Childhood Linklater, 2022) (Netflix)
A delightful surprise: an animated / rotoscoped film set in 1969 in Texas, against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Our protagonist is Stanley, who's about ten, and is the youngest of a large brood of siblings. His father works at NASA, and maybe that's why Stanley is recruited by two mysterious men in black, who need someone smaller than an adult for a test voyage to the moon.
Yes, it is possible that not everything in this movie is 100% factual. But it's so marvellously evocative of the era: audio bites of Janis Joplin, of the JFK speech that started it all, of Arthur C Clarke; over-chlorinated pools, everybody smoking, prank phone calls, Monkees records, corporal punishment ... Though only one of the virtual film group grew up in America, we all recognised so much from our childhoods.
Beautifully made, too: sometimes the blurriness of home cinematography, sometimes the Kodachrome colours of old photographs. And the soundtrack was brilliant, Sixties greats from start to finish.
The 'secret moon mission' story, which seemed just a child's fantasy to begin with, became a metaphor for Stanley's sense of being the odd one out (he's not in most of the family photos because he's the youngest), the one without agency. The moon is a lonely place, too.
Great examination of childhood and how the mundane and insignificant interacts with great changes in the wider world.
Quote from the virtual film club: "has anyone under fifty managed to watch this film to the end?"
23APR22: The Adam Project (Levy, 2022) (Netflix)
In which time pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) travels back to 2022 and teams up with his younger self (Walker Scobell, debut role, excellent screen chemistry with Reynolds). Adam1 wants to save his wife Laura (Zoe Saldanaaaaaaa) and also change the future, which was / will be horrid. They work with Adam's father (Mark Ruffalo) who is, of course, a brilliant quantum physicist. There are some special effects. Not everyone gets to go home.
That all makes it sound very facile, which is ... not incorrect. But it has heart, and some clever plotting, and better time-travel explanations than the MCU, and a myriad references to genre: Back to the Future, Face/Off, Last Starfighter, Star Wars etc etc. I had not realised when watching that Levy and Reynolds also collaborated on Free Guy, another fun and frivolous science fiction movie with heart that I enjoyed much more than I'd anticipated.
Initially Tom Cruise was slated to play the title role (older version, at least). We dodged a bullet there. The humour is what makes this film effective: without Reynolds or someone his comic equivalent, this would have been very gloomy.
Also several strong female roles: Adam's mother (Jennifer Garner), Laura (ZOE! SALDANAAAA!), and the uber-villain (Catherine Keener).
