Dogs Bark

There’s No Place Like CGI - - Wicked (2024, USA, Color, 160 min)

Recommended. Can you love a movie but still have issues? Of course. But let’s start with the good news. Ariana Grande (Don’t Look Up) can act! Enough such that her Broadway voice and dancing in Wicked are joyous. And she’s funny . . . mugging up Glinda the Good Witch like she’s waited for the part all her life (she has!) And, given Harriet, we (and the Academy) know Cynthia Erivo can really act. She also dances, is funny, and makse the finale song, Defying Gravity, SOAR. The rest of Wicked is tolerable. Too long and glitzy . . . the long attributable to its Part 1 status. Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park) was surprisingly inoffensive, but the talking animals and most of the other supporting actors are forgettable. The flying monkeys were not as deeply disturbing as in The Wizard Of Oz. Despite all this - - if you love Oz, or the stage musical - - you’ll love Wicked.

Order Up! - - La Cocina (2024, Mexico/USA, B/W, 139 min)

Strongly Recommended. La Cocina begins with a semi-impressionist collage of images following a girl, Estela (radiant newcomer Anna Díaz), a spirited yet cautious applicant for a kitchen job at The Grill . . . a fictitious, mid-scale restaurant off of Times Square. Quickly the story transitions to a fast-paced, noisy and excellent tableau of life amongst the, mostly Latinx and marginally legal, kitchen staff. If you have ever worked in a restaurant, you know the world that Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios (Gueros) assembles. This is one of those thoughtful comedies that intercalates truthful tragedy within its plot. The chief story is the romance between waitress Julia (Rooney Mara, Carol) and Pedro (Raúl Briones, Asfixia), a cook. Mara is the only Hollywood regular in the cast and she enters the company with native grace; however, the whole cast is outstanding. I particularly liked Lee Sellers (Tár) as the volatile Chef, architect of the madness

Santa Caterina, Prega Per Noi! - - Under The Tuscan Sun (2003, USA, Color, 113 min)

Not recommended. Not much to say about this dreadful movie. In celebration of Cinecittà, it’s difficult to avoid a movie filmed in Siena and almost totally in the Toscana countryside. And Diane Lane (Unfaithful) has always turned my head . . . but I should have looked away. First off, this movie abuses every Italian romantic cliché under ANY sun. We get weepy. old mama mias and dutiful Italian widowers. The dialogue even includes the line, “That’s exactly what American women think Italian men say.” And then she screws him, so I guess it worked on director and writer Audrey Wells (George of the Jungle). Although the photography (Geoffrey Simpson, Shine) is hard to screw up - - its‘s Tuscany, right - - Christophe Beck’s (Frozen) insipid score ruins every aerial shot. Sandra Oh (Sideways) - - a talented actor elsewhere - - basically tosses off silly lines about creepy Italian trees. So did I like anything about this movie? No.

Getting In The Vote - - Conclave (2024, USA/UK, Color, 120 min)

Recommended. The strength of Edward Berger’s (All Quiet on the Western Front) new Vatican procedural lies in its principal players. If you place Stanley Tucci (The Devil Wears Prada), John Lithgow (Intersteller), and Isabella Rosellini (Big Night) in the bullpen and with Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient) as your starting pitcher, you’re going to win the World Series. The story is a little dodgy, with more twists and turns than a Greg Maddow two-seamer. And the ending was odd but does have some ecclesiastical value . . . in a queer sort of way. Perhaps the reveal could be approached with more finesse. But given that Conclave is not a documentary, I greatly enjoyed it. The score (Volker Bertelmann, All Quiet on the Western Front) also lacked subtlety. But the movie’s production director, Suzie Davies (Saltburn), deserves the biggest Oscar for recreating the Sistine Chapel on the Cinecittà backlot. Michealangelo would be flabbergasted.

Going Home Again - - Will and Harper (2024, USA, Color, 114 min)

Strongly recommended. Gender dysphoria is a bitch. Just ask Lana Wachowski (The Matrix) . . . or Eliot Page (Juno) . . . or Harper Steele (Saturday Night Live) screenwriter and co-star, with Will Farrell (Anchorman), of Netflix documentary, Will And Harper. Steele is the latest entertainer to come out as transgender and is a long-time colleague and friend of Farrell, and dozens of SNL cast members. The documentary literally follows Steele and Farrell on a cross-country road trip to redefine and re-cement their friendship. Along the way, it uses Steele’s attempt to reconnect his relationship to the America he loved as a man but now explores as a woman. Steele’s new and uneasy self-image makes this a challenge as the film explores - - with grace, humor, and some pain - - the many issues faced by gender reassignment and the test of a post-transition friendship. Director Josh Greenbaum (Strays) sweetly sincere documentary has a lock on an Oscar.

I Can Get It for you Wholesale - - The Substance (2024, UK/France, Color, 141 min) - - 28 September 2024

Not recommended. The Substance starts with a good premise, develops nicely, but ends in the most revolting 20 minutes since the bathtub scene in Saltburn. Who knows why the Cannes jury awarded the Best Screenplay trophy to this unfunny disappointment? The movie threatens Gran Guignol with an early-on close-up of TV exec Dennis Quaid (Great Balls Of Fire) slobbering down shrimp while horrified actress Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, Ghost) looks on. It’s Sparkle’s 50^th birthday, and she’s too old to keep her job. She turns to a shadowy wonder drug, The Substance, to create a new “her.” A younger girl emerges . . . literally (Margaret Qualley, Poor Things). At this point, an intelligent take on youth and drugs - - read Ozempic - - seems possible; Moore’s poignant enactment of a woman endlessly reconceiving her make-up for a date is promising. But soon after, special effects took the wheel, and the movie degenerated into stupidity.

Gaw! - - Pygmalion (1938, GB, B/W, 89 min) - - 25 September 2024

Strongly recommended. If you are still smarting over the choice of Audrey Hepburn over Julie Andrews to play Miss Eliza Doolittle, you may be a Sicilian. And if it matters that much to you, you deserve to see the original celluloid performer, Dame Wendy Hiller (Murder On The Orient Express).  This role was the source of her first Oscar nomination, losing to Bette Davis in Jezebel. George Bernard Shaw received his only Academy Award for the script, in which he was deeply involved, even insisting on Ms. Hiller’s selection. So, you might say Wendy was the REAL guttersnipe. Leslie Howard (The Petrified Forest) directed himself as Henry Higgins and may be a better one than Rex Harrison in closeness of age. The most amusing bit of casting trivia is Cathleen Nesbit (An Affair To Remember)  as “A Lady,” eventually playing Mrs. Higgins in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady.

Who Are We To Disagree? - - Kinds Of Kindness (2024, USA, Color, 164 min) - - 4 September 2024

Recommended. But barely, because Kinds Of Kindness is a strange and challenging movie, or actually, three short - - but subtly interconnected - - challenging movies. Yorgos Lanthimos’s (The Favourite) masterful Poor Things, set him up for an easy A, but Kinds Of Kindness is much harder to like.  The opening music sets up the theme: The Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams, which most reviewers assign to dominance and control. But it’s the dream - - specifically, the American one - - that Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou (The Lobster) are playing with herein. It’s just that control is crucial to the dream. The cast is wonderful, with the Lanthimos regular Emma Stone (Poor Things) once again nailing down strangeness, backed up by the luminous Margaret Qualley (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood), Willam Defoe (Poor Things) and non-regular, but Cannes-be-knighted, Jessie Plemons (The Irishman), who adapts perfectly. It’s gruesome and bleak, so beware . . . Kinds Of Kindness is never kind.

Behind Every Unsuccessful Man - - The Country Girl - - (1954, USA, B/W, 104 min)

Recommended. I started this collection of short reviews because so many of my close friends asked me for my opinions on movies. It’s grown into over 800 strong, 120,000 words. I mention this because I was recently asked about this movie; as a totally enthralled Grace Kelly (Rear Window) acolyte, one would expect I had seen her only Oscar^©-winning performance. I now have and The Country Girl is a very good movie, a refined take on alcoholism, addiction, and fame . . . more A Star Is Born than Lost Weekend. Bing Crosby (Going My Way) gives a reasonable interpretation, perhaps reflecting his youthful drinking. Kelly, as Crosby’s wife, deserved her 1955 Academy Award, beating out Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina. Rarely has the co-dependency question been more thoughtfully raised, although cf, The Days Of Wine And Roses. But William Holden (Sabrina) - - who suffered and died of alcoholism - - provides the saddest irony.

Swallowing Your Emotions - - Tuesday (2023, UK/USA, Color, 111 min) - - 15 June 2024

Recommended. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Enough Said) was on the Colbert show last week promoting Tuesday, describing it as a woman facing the death of her teenage daughter . . . arriving as a giant talking parrot. This seemed so absurd that Tuesday could've been the worst - - or the most innovative - - movie of the year. It’s far from the first.  Louis-Dreyfus’s dramatic chops are well-used, but the part wouldn’t have worked without a twinkle of Elaine Benes. Croatian director/writer Daina Oniunas-Pusic understands the comedy of death - - even the death of a child - - and Louis-Dreyfus meets this challenge head-on. We’re distracted at first by the English accent of her daughter, Tuesday, played by Lola Petticrew (She Said), but Petticrew’s talent suspends disbelief. Death is wonderfully voiced by Afro-Brit Arinzé Kene (The Pass). The magical plot is too strange to describe, minus spoilers, but I liked it, especially the ending, which might really put some off.