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Movies
The performances are great (Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, so duh), as is the writing itself (August Wilson, so duh). But boy, this is just completely baffling on a technical level. I guess aesthetic is subjective, but I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to take a play-to-film adaptation that imo ideally would have been full of long takes and long shots and instead make it consist almost entirely of erratically edited-together close ups. Maybe this is just some artsy vibe that I'm not keyed into, but as I experienced it, this movie is at war with its best elements, which is a shame given those elements. Grade: B-
I can't say there's much of my Irish heritage left beyond a residual disdain for British monarchs and some memories of my grandfather singing "Londonderry Air." I guess there was also that one time that my boss jokingly called me a "mick." But that's about it. I'm going to guess that John Patrick Shanley has about the same connection to Ireland as I do, because what in the world is this? It's like one of those "generic decades songs" from Bojack Horseman, only a movie and about Ireland: there are pub singalongs, green hills, salt-o'-the-earth musings about the countryside, really bad "tope o' thuh marnin" accents from a central cast who is almost exclusively not Irish (Christopher Walken???), a pivotal scene involving a pint of Guinness—like, come on, the only thing missing is flaming red hair and lots of children subsisting on potatoes. And then there's the writing, which contrives a romance so ludicrous and overcooked that it's almost surreal—given that this is the same dude who wrote and directed Joe Versus the Volcano, maybe I shouldn't rule out surreality as an intentional effect, but also, John Patrick Shanley did We're Back and Congo, too, so maybe he's just this chaotic neutral filmmaking presence that's impossible to trust. As it is, this is probably the most incredible mainstream cinema disaster since Cats, though unfortunately it does not even begin to approach that other movie's pileup of fevered-dream bad decisions. Mostly, this is just bad. Also, I was very disappointed to find out that Jon Hamm was not one of the actors in the cast doing a preposterous Irish accent. Grade: D-
For a while there, I thought that people were intentionally under-rating late-period Woody Allen because of his insufferable public persona and what he ("allegedly," I guess) did to Dylan Farrow—which is fair, though not exactly how I engage with movies. And I still think that's probably the case for stuff like Irrational Man and Café Society. But at the same time, these last couple features have really seen Woody settling into exactly the things people have accused his late-period of being: a complacent parade of self-plagiarism, stale cultural references, phony bourgeois posturing, and dodgy sexual dynamics. It's not like these things haven't been present in pieces throughout most of Allen's career (or even all together in, e.g., Whatever Works). But Wonder Wheel and now A Rainy Day in New York represent a particularly somnolent turn from Allen, movies with almost no spark of life at all, embodying these tropes out of sheer laziness and retroactively flattening a filmography that, on par, is somewhat more complex than people tend to give it credit for these days. Which I guess makes it easier to dismiss Allen as a filmmaker, because at this point, he's just not good. It's contagious, too. The cast is wringing incredibly weak performances out of some of the most tepid writing of Allen's career (Timothée Chalamet in particular, whose character is named "Gatsby Welles," in case you wanted to know what level of unintentional self-parody Allen is working on here), and the whole film is a structureless blob that nobody involved seems to know what to do with except maybe Selena Gomez, who is at least fun to see onscreen (a surprise to me, I'll admit), and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Allen's only productive collaborator nowadays and whose work gives an artificial, soundstage-y quality to what I think are on-location shoots here, which is interesting. But unlike some of Allen's bad movies in the past, neither of those positive notes makes a good case for watching this movie despite the movie. If anyone's still on the Allen train, now might be the time to get off. Grade: C-
Francis Ford Coppola's first non-erotic feature film is basically a Psycho riff, only if Psycho made no sense on a plot level and was about a woman who was trying to commit inheritance fraud instead of embezzle money from an employer. This is basically proto-giallo in terms of how it values style over plot coherence, though this might have worked better if the style were just a little more developed and the plot made just a little more sense. But I guess you gotta start somewhere, right? Grade: B-
Coppola's second "respectable" feature is a French-New-Wave-style screwball comedy about a recently adulted man (and virgin, the film is sure we understand) who is forced to live on his own for the first time. There's a kind of sweetness to the movie in the way that movies like Superbad can be sweet even at their raunchiest, where it finds bemused sympathy for a straight male interested in sex but flummoxed and befuddled at performing the patriarchal, chauvinist masculine scripts that our society says must be embodied in order to access sex. The film definitely wears out its welcome, though, as it becomes clear that it doesn't have enough jokes or enough subtle pathos to fill its 97 minutes, and a lot of what feels fun and zany at the beginning unfortunately just becomes grating by the end. Coppola's got a really interesting style here, though: a lot looser and less considered than what he would become known for (lots of rambling, urban long takes here), but also a lot slicker than his previous, almost shambling feature, Dementia 13. Progress, I suppose, though this movie isn't demonstrably more entertaining for it. Grade: B-
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