Quick Hits: You Hurt My Feelings; The Starling Girl

Eliza Scanlen in The Starling Girl; Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Your Hurt My Feelings

The characters in a Nicole Holofcener picture always have problems, but they tend to be cute problems—like how Catherine Keener can’t decide how to donate her wealth in Please Give, or how James Gandolfini is incapable of whispering in Enough Said. This doesn’t make their emotional confusion or existential despair any less real; it’s just that their floundering is undergirded by a bedrock of professional success and academic sophistication. So what’s interesting about You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener’s latest look at privileged people, is that while this sense of accomplishment remains firmly in place, it’s also questionably earned. The heroes of this movie all live in nice Manhattan homes and hold impressive jobs, yet they don’t seem to actually be good at anything.

Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a published author who teaches a creative writing course, but her memoir didn’t sell and she’s yet to land a second book deal; her students are shocked to learn that she’s a real writer. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist who’s been practicing for decades, yet his patients are constantly complaining that he never actually helps them. (Whenever he’s with a client, he hangs a shabby “In Session” sign on his door.) Their son, Eliot (Owen Teague), works at a weed dispensary and is perpetually drafting a play that’s never close to being finished. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is an interior decorator who seems to only have one client—a woman who never approves of her banal fixture suggestions. Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), is a struggling actor who’s yet to receive his big break. Read More

From the Vault: Finding Nemo, 20 Years Later

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

My does this movie have a pulse. This is filmmaking at its most vibrant, an indefatigable romp of breathtaking splendor. Every meticulously constructed frame is teeming with detail, so much so that our eyes despair futilely in a hopeless attempt to digest everything on screen. This visual magnificence is somehow equaled by dialogue that is delightfully droll, and a storyline that is perfect in its simplicity. Adults, check your cynicism at the door; the experience of watching Finding Nemo – the fifth full-length feature from Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios – is one of pure joy. Read More

From the Vault: The Italian Job, 20 Years Later

Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and Jason Statham in The Italian Job

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

The Italian Job showcases the continued emergence of one of cinema’s newest sub-genres: the heist remake. In 1999, John McTiernan delivered The Thomas Crown Affair, a more erotic but less involving film than its 1968 predecessor. Two years ago, Steven Soderbergh’s wildly successful update of Ocean’s Eleven (originally starring Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in 1960) wowed audiences with its high-profile cast and elaborate set pieces. Now, F. Gary Gray brings us a modernized version of The Italian Job, the 1969 caper featuring Michael Caine. Read More

Fast X: Why So Furious?

Vin Diesel in Fast X

Bloat is endemic to all franchises, but the Fast & Furious pictures have a peculiar way of taking on water. For all of their chases and explosions and putative danger, these noisy conflagrations are curiously averse to death, loss, and even long-term conflict; antagonists aren’t defeated but converted into partners—new members of an ever-sprawling family. Fast X, the tidily titled tenth installment, doesn’t attempt to solve this problem, but it does exhibit some meta awareness of it. At one point, a beefy suit named Aimes (Alan Ritchson, from Amazon’s Reacher series), who works for a nebulous government(?) outfit known as The Agency, delivers an expository rundown describing how an erstwhile gang of California street racers gradually shifted from hijacking DVD players to landing on Interpol’s Most Wanted list—all the while turning cops into robbers. It’s a pointless info dump (did you really not know who these guys were before you bought your ticket?), but it also evinces a shiver of discernment. This is our formula, proclaims the screenplay from Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin. These movies have never made any sense—not narratively, not physically, and certainly not emotionally—but at least now they’re owning up to it.

To suggest that Fast X is clever is to travel several suspension bridges too far. All of the saga’s usual flaws—lugubrious characters, limp comedy, outrageous but unconvincing set pieces—remain in place, to the point where the new director, studio journeyman Louis Leterrier (replacing Lin, who departed due to the dreaded “creative differences”), seems to treat them as inherited property. And as was the case with the prior episode, the tedious F9, the franchise continues a misguided attempt to mine its own history—here opening with a recreation of the climactic Rio de Janeiro vault heist from Fast Five, complete with necromantic flashbacks of the late Paul Walker. (If you were concerned the series might actually wrestle with Walker’s death and incorporate it into the story, never fear; a throwaway line that “Mia and Brian are safe” satisfies all interested parties as to their absence, though Jordana Brewster does appear for a short scene of auntly protection.) Read More

BlackBerry: Game of Phones

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry

The very last thing you hear in BlackBerry—I promise I’m not spoiling anything—is the high-pitched whine of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. To younger viewers, it’ll sound like an atonal clash of beeps and hisses, but for folks of a certain age, it’ll instantly transport you (OK, me) back to the mid-’90s: that nascent online era of Napster, Geocities, and Netscape Navigator. Directed by Matt Johnson from a script he wrote with Matthew Miller, BlackBerry isn’t purely a nostalgia piece, but an undeniable part of its appeal lies in its authentic evocation of a time when the worldwide web was a vast electronic frontier, full of hope and possibility. We had no clue what the internet might become, which meant it could become absolutely anything.

It turned into a lot of things, including (from an entrepreneurship perspective) a breeding ground for false promises, egomaniacal puffery, and unrealized dreams. Anyone could conceive of anything; the question was whether they could actually make and sell it. This inherent tension between imagination and execution—the challenge of transmuting far-flung ideas into actionable results—is familiar ground for storytelling, and BlackBerry’s tech-bubble saga of success and failure occupies well-trod territory. (The book it’s based on, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, literally includes the phrase “extraordinary rise and spectacular fall” in its subtitle.) What makes the movie entertaining, aside from its irresistible contrast in personalities, is its bountiful specificity. It opens in 1996 Ontario and occasionally feels like it was actually shot then and there—less a modern docudrama than a magic portal into a time and place of wheezing hatchbacks, wanly lit offices, and first-person shooters. Read More