A few more to add to my tally for this year. I'll probably wind up seeing three or four more this holiday weekend (though zero of them will be
X-Men or
Alice), but from last weekend...
The Nice Guys was probably my most anticipated movie of the year, and I enjoyed the heck out of it, even though by the time the sixth trailer was released there was very little left that felt like I hadn't seen. Shane Black returns to similar territory as
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with a mismatched pair of detectives bumbling their way through Los Angeles trying to unravel a conspiracy leaving bodies in its wake, this time being a period piece set in 1977. I'm not really that big a Russell Crowe fan, but he was effective enough as a sort of funhouse mirror version of his character in
L.A. Confidential (Kim Basinger is along again, too), but this movie is really all about winding up Ryan Gosling and watching him go as a drunken, incompetent, cowardly private eye who screams like a girl but somehow manages to brush himself off and keep going.
The period details are fun and Gosling is a hoot and a half, but sadly the one ingredient that is lacking is an interesting plot. Here the story feels almost like an afterthought, a really bare genre construction, which is a shame because a tight, twisty plot would have made it all perfect. Still a lot of fun, and I wish this thing would make a ton of money so that we could see a sequel with these characters...but that ain't gonna happen. It could have been marvelous as TV series, a
"Rockford Files" for the 21st century set in the same time period as the Jim Garner show, though then you wouldn't have had Gosling and Crowe. Oh, well. But I'm definitely going back before it leaves the theaters to see
The Nice Guys again. Too much fun.
Love & Friendship. I am a huge Whit Stillman fan, and he's back with only his second movie of the 2000s, five years after
Damsels in Distress. For the first time Whit adapts material that isn't his own, and also does a period piece that is set longer ago than a nebulous recent past as his
Barcelona and
The Last Days of Disco had been.
Love & Friendship is a Jane Austen piece. Not one of the five novels she is most famous for and that have been adapted for the big screen, small screen, and stage seemingly dozens of times each but instead an early novella,
Lady Susan. Yes, it is another comedy of manners and worrying about who should marry who, but especially when filtered through Stillman's own senses and sensibilities it has some sharper edges of wit and deadpan laughs than are sometimes wrought from Austen adaptations.
Kate Beckinsale is wonderful as the manipulative Lady Susan, who after her elderly husband has died is attaching herself to relatives with a scheme of marrying a rich and impressionable younger man. Her machinations are effective, even after some of the bewigged people in her wake begin to grow distrustful of her, but it is all thrown out of whack when her own daughter enters the picture and begins drawing affection naturally and without intent. Some big laughs throughout, and for material that might not have sounded suitable for Whit on first flush, it is a perfect marriage. How downright Austen.
The Lobster I have been wanting to see since it premiered at LAST YEAR'S Cannes Film Festival, where Yorgos Lanthimos won the Jury Prize. Greek filmmaker Lanthimos broke through a few years back with the twisted and mesmerizing
Dogtooth. This time he has an all-star international cast, including Colin Farrell, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Léa Seydoux, and Rachel Weisz. Set in a slightly Sci-Fi-ish near future where society has taken speed dating to an extreme. Adults who are single, either by being widowed or simply being too weird to pair up with anybody, are taken to a resort type place where they are given thirty days to find a suitable match. If after the allotted time you have not found somebody to marry, you are taken to a special room and have your organs (at least the ones that will fit) transferred into an animal of your choosing. Sort of instant reincarnation, by way of Josef Mengele. If you pair up, you return to the city, and if you try to escape before you can be transformed you live in the woods and are hunted for sport.
That's the basic premise, and we follow Colin Ferrell's pudgy David through his journey. Very high concept, obviously, and very dark and funny. It's almost impossible not to compare such a movie to the work of Charlie Kaufman, and while mostly that comparison is a favorable one I would say that ultimately Yorgos Lanthimos is less hopeful a world view than Kaufman, which for me is the genius of Kaufman, that his dark, elaborate fantasies have a current of love and genuine affection running through them, no matter how convoluted and insane the narrative is. Those who have seen
Dogtooth will not be surprised to find Yorgos is darker.
Three very good movies, all worth seeing. That was a good weekend.
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