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jillmuscat
Reviews
This Is Where I Leave You (2014)
Funny and Fun -- See It!
As mother and grown-up sibs gather for their patriarch's funeral, all the absurdities of 21st century life are on parade -- ovulation thermometers, buzzing cell phones, shock jocks, boob jobs, tell-all books, cougars, late-life lesbianism, baby monitors and lots and lots of weed. There's also plenty of fighting, childish behavior and some poignant moments.
EVERYONE in the cast delivers good laughs. Bateman is perfect as the sad sack middle son and Fey is a great foil for him as his aggressive sister. And as the trendy, opinionated, over-sexed mom, no one could be better than Fonda.
Since funerals and families are universal, I think many people will relate to this movie. Also, with plenty of dumb comedies around, it's a real treat to see a smart one.
Midnight in Paris (2011)
See It for the Moveable Feast -- Ignore the Allenisms!
Ever wondered what it might have been like to live in 1920s Paris and party with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and all the other superstar bohemians who were there? Owen Wilson plays a 21st century screenwriter who visits Paris with his bride-to-be and is magically transported back to this fabled era -- but only between midnight and dawn. The results are hilarious,the portraits of the artists as young men and women are both wonderfully satiric and accurate. Owen Wilson is great interacting with these characters; I loved his slack-jawed disbelief and excitement. Lots of magical, beautiful romantic shots of Paris make this movie even more of a joy.
Unfortunately, many other elements of this movie are a drag. Allen always gets the best actors, but here gives many of them nothing to work with. Wilson's fiancée and her parents are unfunny caricatures of materialistic, philistine Americans. Whenever Wilson is with them, he becomes an annoying California blonde version of whiny Woody. Another really familiar Allen target -- the pretentious pseudo-intellectual -- is portrayed by the usually wonderful Michael Sheen and the results are equally flat. Allen's been egging eggheads since the 1970s; it was really funny the first 20 times or so, but not anymore.
Hot in Cleveland (2010)
Long Live Laughter!!!!
I really hope this show is renewed! Funny, silly, likable comedy served up by four of the best comic actresses ever! Malick, Bertinelli and Leeves are show biz types from LA who accidentally land in Cleveland en route to Paris, and decide to stay in a house where White is the caretaker. The three middle-aged gals were ignored in L.A., but get a lot more attention from men in Cleveland -- and that's much of the premise of the show.
I love the characters; Malick is an egotistical former soap opera actress, Bertinelli a ditsy romantic self-help author, Leeves a hard-drinking yet clear-eyed British beautician and White an astonishingly tart-tongued senior with the best love life of all the ladies.
I've tried to like more modern sitcoms like 30 ROCK and PARKS AND RECREATION, but have found them so mean-spirited, strange, and depressingly devoid of laughter. HOT IN CLEVELAND is sometimes predictable, but the actresses put it over anyway with impeccable comic timing. The characters bicker constantly, but are good friends who love and support one another, which makes it a pleasure to watch.
Comparison with GOLDEN GIRLS are inevitable, but this is more fun because the 3 main characters are much younger and don't have to think about the problems of old age.
Isn't She Great (2000)
Wild, wacky and watchable!
Middle-aged women of the world unite -- and watch this movie! The real-life story of Jackie Susann's meteoric and incredibly unlikely rise to fame is much more compelling than any of the sexploitation novels she wrote.
Well into her 40s, Susann had three dreadful strikes against her -- her only child was autistic and institutionalized, her acting career had flopped and then she got cancer. She had ground out a novel about the sex-and-drugs peccadilloes of showbiz types, which was considered junk by any and all established literary standards. But Jackie had a shrewd, intuitive sense of what turned ordinary people on, a flamboyant flair for promoting herself plus relentless energy and ambition. She achieved about a decade of glorious success as top best-selling author until she succumbed to a recurrence of cancer in her 50s.
If you like this story line, you'll probably like the movie. It's handled in a high-camp manner, with very broad performances by Bette Midler and the rest. Midler and Lane, who plays her kindly and rather pathetic hanger-on of a husband, are wonderfully funny playing a couple with absolutely no class at all. If you were a kid in the 1960s, as I was, you'll probably enjoy Bette wafting around in outrageous outfits and dos.
My only criticism is that this very comic style makes the movie play like an extended, patched-together sequence of comedy sketches, rather than a movie. Also, to enjoy the movie, I think it helps if you're a New Yorker. In NYC, eccentricity has traditionally been not just tolerated but encouraged. Many people from other more staid parts of the country come to New York for this reason -- Susann herself was a New York transplant from Philadelphia. Also, NYC attracts lots of wildly ambitious people vying to make it in the worlds of showbiz, the arts, publishing, finance, etc. So,as goofy as Midler's portrait is, it seemed endearingly familiar to me.
The Haunting (1963)
Good but diminished by time and the small screen
A professor (Johnson) goes to investigate reports of haunting at a house with a Gothic history, aided by a neurotic, repressed spinster (Harris), a self-confident, clairvoyant lesbian (Bloom) and the sleazy wise-guy heir to the house (Tamblyn.) I saw this as a kid in the theater and it really scared the heck out of me. Today I found it fun to watch, but draggy, repetitive and talky in some parts, and thus not especially chilling. It might have worked better if it had been about 20-30 minutes shorter.
I'm a huge fan of Harris, Bloom and Tamblyn and thought they were all very good here. Though compelled to be over the top at times, I found Harris' hysteria and loneliness very human and sad. Bloom's shifting between snippiness and seductive kindness helped keep things interesting. Tamblyn was such a cute guy and provided the right elements of comic relief and common sense. Johnson, stuck with the least compelling role, neither detracted from nor added much to the film.
The camera work was truly outstanding but didn't come across as dramatically on TV, especially with those confounded black strips that wide-screen movies have.
To be fair, over the years I've seen many a haunted house flick, making the film fairly predictable for me. I would say this movie is probably a must-see for fans of the genre, a fun experience for admirers of Harris and Bloom and a take-it-or-leave-it proposition for the rest of you movie lovers.
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Mother of All Slapstick Comedies; Watch It with Your Kids!
This was a huge favorite of mine as a kid, and whenever I came across it on TV as a teen or young adult, I'd watch it again. Now my husband and two grade-school age sons have already sat through it twice and it was a wonderful experience, the four or us just laughing and laughing for well over two hours. It's incredibly broad, loud, long, fast, crude and filled with hilariously repulsive characters.
The plot is thus: at the scene of a car crash, a dying gangster reveals the location of his stolen fortune to a group of strangers standing by the road. This motley group of ordinary folks go absolutely nuts on a greed-driven slapstick pursuit of the loot.
To me, Dick Shawn was the stand-out as a early 60s-style beach bum/hipster. ("You're buggin' me, man!") I loved seeing the usually noble Spencer Tracy as a crooked cop and hen-pecked husband tangling with the unforgettably whiny phone persona of Selma Diamond. And it's great to see the comic talents of the era strut their stuff -- Milton Berle, Sid Ceasar, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney, Ethel Merman, Phil Silvers, Jim Backus and more. Many of these guys were New York- Jewish-Catskill types and their type of sharp humor has virtually vanished today.
Yet my kids who have absolutely no awareness of the nostalgia aspects of the movie enjoyed it as much as I did. The no-holds-barred physical comedy and the universal theme of greed should get laughs out of any generation.
House of D (2004)
My brain was skeptical but my heart loved it
A middle-aged American living in Paris re-lives his very difficult, unusual coming of age in early 1970s New York.
Interesting that so many critics roasted this film while so many IMDb users sincerely loved it.
Funny thing is, I agree with both groups! I concede that the plot is often contrived, the adult-looking-back framework is awkwardly handled, and it stretches credulity that Tommy the teen-aged hero would befriend both a mentally challenged janitor and a woman prisoner sitting in the window of the local jailhouse.
And yet...I hung on every word and wept buckets as I haven't done in years. Some of the reasons are personal and subjective: I'm the mom of a precocious boy just a little younger than the hero. I'm the same age as David Ducovny, grew up in NYC and share his nostalgia for a pre-Gentrification NY that was scruffier, more colorful and in some ways more fun than the cleaned-up, ridiculously overpriced city of today.
But I also think the critics snubbed a film that really has a lot going for it. Anton Yelchin who plays Tommy the boy is a remarkably gifted and appealing actor; Tea Leoni seemed very real as his widowed mother, a loving woman driven over the edge by difficult circumstances; and though I think Robin Williams is sometimes way over the top, he was very moving as the boy's simple-minded but brave friend. Erykah Badu was another stand-out, soulful and hilarious as Tommy's wise jailhouse pal.
All these characters are underdogs, very sympathetic and beautifully portrayed underdogs, and that's why I think this is such an effective tear-jerker if not a great work of art.