"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Entering the canon of British films for which I would have liked subtitles (I thought I had a better handle on Northern accents than that), Finding Emily is a cute romcom in which Angourie Rice (an Emily) commits ethical violations to get a first on her psychology case study, pushing Spike Fearn's Owen into sabotaging himself to find the Emily he met that one night and it was amazing and oh gosh, he didn't get her last name, etc. The film there deconstructs the "persistent suitor", among other romance tropes, like the pixie dream girl and the grand gesture, but doesn't escape them entirely. It's a foregone conclusion he'll realize THIS is the Emily for him, and the film's thesis may in fact be that it's okay to like romance tropes and let the fantasy delight you even if current analysis would make it either toxic or cheesy. The movie wins us over by being quite funny, too, with every character having their own detailed personality quirks and background stories. You kind of want to know what the deal is with a lot of these people - Finding Emily could be a TV series - and the use of modern technology and attitudes gives it a fresh perspective. Very Brit soundtrack, too. A real sense of place.
At home: Set in Glasgow, Late Night Shopping presents four twentysomethings who work night shifts at a variety of jobs, and hang out after, waiting for the run to rise. The title refers to their "shopping" for love, or in one character's case, for friendship. In this nightly world, a lot of people cross each other coincidentally, which leads to the pick-up artist of the group to sleep with his friend's day-shift girlfriend who he hasn't seen in weeks. Oops! And while this is the main plot, it's really a hang-out movie and it's fun getting to know these characters and laughing at their foibles. The structure likes to flash back to reveal information when it's most interesting, and there's a great gag that supports the soundtrack choices, as well. The UK seemed to be making a lot of these types of movies at the turn of the Millennium - Trainspotting, Human Traffic, South West 9 - but this one is drug-free. Who needs drugs when the fog of being up late every night keeps you in a perpetual state of making mistakes?
Have you ever had a break-up so devastating, it broke the world? Love at Second Sight ("Mon Inconnue", which literally should translate as "My Stranger", but you can't keep a cheesy pun down) shows us the high school meetcute between Raphaël (François Civil) and Olivia (Joséphine Japy), then a 10-year montage of their whirlwind romance, until Raph, now a successful novelist, starts acting like a jackass and she leaves. The next day - with a riff on Groundhog Day (a snow storm and a flip clock turning to 8:00) - he wakes up in an alternate universe where they didn't get together and she's a famous concert pianist and he never published a damn thing. I'm not sure we can invoke physics, here, but he believes if he can get her to fall in love with him all over again (in this new reality, we're not talking about time travel), he can snap back to his world. It's a goal that's fuelled by selfishness. Shouldn't he prefer an Olivia who had personal success instead of sacrificing for his? The mechanics of the character arc are put into motion well, and if we initially may dislike Raphaël, Civil is quite funny in his reactions to the new timeline, and becomes endearing. We tend to think leading man looks mean you can't be funny, but he joins Ryan Gosling in disproving the notion. Japy is great, too, as the emotional core of the romance.
They don't bill Netflix movies as TV movies, but that's really what they are, even if they have bigger names attached. Voicemails for Isabelle is a Zoey Deutch romcom, and she's as likeable as ever, but the romcom is really the least interesting thing about this movie, and I think it's because the co-lead is never really in focus. Her struggles at a high-end restaurant vs. Nick Offerman's douchey chef are much more interesting, Her tragedy - having lost a younger sister to cancer and still having conversations with her voicemail - is the real love affair of the film. In comparison, Nick Robinson is affable enough, but he's just her manic pixie dream boat, never really wanting to con her using the voicemails he's accidentally getting after he inherits the sister's number. He's just a sad romcom guy trapped in a romcom cliché. And believe me, there's plenty of those to go around. The tropes overtake whatever truth (about grief, about sisters, about self-confidence) and leave us with a movie that's fine, but not equal to its premise.
Using similar methods as his Spree, Eugene Kotlyarenko's The Code is rather more mockumentary than it is found footage, as a young couple moves into a rental house after the COVID lockdown to "reconnect", though Celine wants to occupy her time filming a documentary about relationships during COVID. Her boyfriend Jay, a NFT artist recently cancelled by the #MeToo movement, has trusts issues and starts misbehaving for fear he'll be caught on camera misbehaving, and off we go. Cleverly put together to give us a full picture of the couple, The Code feels like a puzzle - from its structure, to its title, to an escape room sequence that is really the key to its theme - about figuring a relationship out, and you don't know if it'll turn romantic, sour, or sinister (and I won't spoil it here). At its heart, it's a satire of everything we found irritating in 2021 - uneven masking, people too eager to go out, meta glasses, crypto bros, influencers, that whole online culture. That satire means the leads are pretty terrible people, but perhaps they deserve each other. There are a lot of funny bits, regardless.
Ludwig's second series offers six new puzzle-like mysteries for David Mitchell to solve, plus the overarching mystery of his missing brother and the conspiracy that sent him to ground, continued from Series 1, and to be continued in Series 3. (This is the kind of thing that makes me trepidatious about watching new shows, the long arcs that could leave us in the lurch if a show were to be cancelled before its time.) Having blown up the status quo from Series 1, they find a new reason for Ludwig to sneak around the police station and hide things from potential allies, though the "family" (or "inside circle", if you prefer) grows by quite a bit. Strangely, the junior detectives from Series 1 have been transferred unceremoniously and replaced by new models. The new D.I.s are fun, but I wonder what happened there. The big conspiracy does start to take up a lot of rental space and I sometimes felt like the mystery of the week was handles more hastily, especially in the back three, but Anna Maxwell Martin comes out a winner in the exchange as her Lucy gets more involved (and her own villain).
Ten years after incepting and touring their comedy show, Canadian improv legend Colin Mochrie and Second City-trained hypnotist Asad Mecci produced a special for television. Hyprov: Improv Under Hypnosis is exactly what it sounds like - people are placed under hypnosis and released from their inhibitions and self-consciousness, play improv scenes with Mochrie. To me, it shows that everyone can do it, if they only let go of their mind killer (to borrow the phrase from Dune) and be funny (because improv is an absurd proposition to begin with), even if one doesn't have the tool kit and experience. Hypnosis shows are already making people do laughable things anyway. What they don't normally have is someone competent to bounce off of. That's Mochrie's role, pushing the comedy further, asking the right questions of his partners, and reacting humorously to their prompts. The 45-minute special is a montage of bits from a single show in Oshawa, intercut with the performers' reactions afterwards. It's all fairly slim, with more singing that you'd expect from Who's Line Is It Anyway?'s worst singer, but it's an amusing enough puff piece. In person, I can believe the criticism that there's "a lot of admin", but that's all cut from the presentation here.
[2001] The Princess Diaries: Obviously not produced with me in mind - I was more invested (only invested?) in the low-key love affair between Julie Andrews and her bodyguard - but even from an objective position (driven neither by nostalgia nor reflexive rejection), I still found the modern fairy tale lacking. Like fine, it's a combination of the secret princess, the ugly duckling, and the Pygmalion tropes. And Genovia is some kind of democratic monarchy where I'm sure no one suffers to keep the royals in silk sheets, equally fine in this context. But the acting and jokes are very "Saved by the Bell" for me, which kept me at a distance, and the stakes are extremely low. Why even introduce the bad faith cousins who stand to inherit the throne if Mia doesn't accept the princessship if you're not going to have them scheme to make sure she doesn't (nor explain just HOW it would throw the kingdom into disarray)? Instead, it's high school that's the real villain, which I guess is why the film resonated with people that age, but I can hardly believe the bullies who keep bullying Mia after she becomes the "popular girl". If they were driven by jealousy, perhaps, but that's not how it's written or played. Rather, it should have been a mirror of the Prime Minister trying to imitate Mia's awkwardness, a retroactive sycophancy that comes with perceived power. But the Diaries aren't really trying to tell us anything except "you can do it". I'm not sure becoming a princess overnight is that magical when the San Francisco of this world is already kind of magical either - the mom's artist loft in an old fire station, the equally unpopular best friend who has her own cable show, the equally teenage would-be boyfriend who works on your vintage car at the garage, everyone on the street knows who the "invisible girl" is and says hi to her... Seems to me either the real world is magical enough and you say no to the throne, or it's visibly NOT and we experience a sense of wonder about all things Genovia. Falls apart at a very basic level for me. More cowbell! (I mean... Julie Andrews!)
[2002] Lilo & Stitch: I really like the look of the art in this one. Both the aliens and the Hawaii-side humans have a roundedness that my brain associates with Disney even I don't think any of their other films looks like this. Though, of course, these characters have passed into pop culture, you could count on me to mislabel which one is Lilo and which one Stitch 50% of the time, so though I knew the very basic premise - little girl befriends alien critter - I was surprised by just who these people were and what drove them. Stitch is an apocalyptic bio-weapon posing as an ugly dog, and Lilo is a troublesome, over-imaginative orphan who isn't making it easy for her big sister to get her guardianship. Ving Rhames looks like himself, playing a social worker as if he were a Man in Black. Kid in the Hall Kevin MacDonald plays a silly alien. The animation is fun. The action is well done. The story has heart. And from this vantage point, I see no reason to remake it with more modern animation.
[2003] Bruce Almighty: Jim Carrey in full comedy mode is something I've gone back and forth (mostly forth) over the years, but I this I like it better when he's NOT a human cartoon, but rather a guy, not unlike himself, a goofball who likes doing voices and faces, and the people around him think he's funny and not a weirdo (though, of course, their tastes may vary). He plays a local television reporter stuck doing jokey human interest stories that keep him from his true ambitions, and blaming bad luck and God for his troubles, gets his "prayers" answered. I remember, at the time, people reacting to Morgan Freeman's casting as God as "perfect", and it still works today. He gives Bruce his powers and responsibilities to see if HE likes it, and Bruce mostly abuses it to make the audience laughs, and obviously, learns the value of taking responsibility for his own life AND revises his priorities. It's fairly simplistic as a plot, but it makes for a cute and wholesome story about faith, in large part thanks to Jennifer Aniston's performance as Bruce's "believer" girlfriend. A lot of fun people in the smaller roles, too... Philip Baker Hall, Nora Dunn, Catherine Bell, SteveN Carell... Much more charming than I remembered from seeing the front half on a disastrous VHS-powered date in the early 2010s.
[2004] The Notebook: Though we're less enamoured with the "persistent suitor" trope now (see above), the film develops a sweet and passionate romance that lasts a lifetime even though other forces conspire to keep the lovers apart. I don't know if the frame tale is trying to engineer a "twist" by playing coy, but it's immediately obvious James Gardner and Gena Rowlands are playing older versions of the characters, even if Rowlands's doesn't remember the events. Gardner's attempts to make her remember nevertheless pay off in beautiful ways. Sad to think now that Rowlands, here cast by her son Nick Cassavetes, would suffer this fate herself. It's good casting, though. I rather question that of the young lovers, however, not because they're not good - the film is surely a big part of Rachel MacAdams's and Ryan Gosling's earned rise to fame - but two Canadian kids playing American Southerners? It's a bit weird. It's pretty straightforward as a period romance, but the frame take takes it over the top.
[2005] Thank You for Smoking: For some, it was Juno, or Up in the Air, but I was on the Jason Reitman train right from his first feature, a satire that asks what the Insider would have been like if it had been a sweet father-son comedy. Our "insider" isn't publicly spilling any beans we don't know about, but he lets us into the world of lobbyists for the things that are bad for you, his greatest feat probably convincing HIMSELF that what he says about tobacco isn't horse pucky. Aaron Eckhart's character is so smooth, and his opponents so self-righteous and even self-interested, that you WANT him to win even though he's shilling for coffin nails. It helps that he's also a pretty good (divorced) dad, even if he's viewed as a bad influence at best, and the Devil at worst, for the business he's in. But whether morally flexible or morally INflexible, the satire doesn't discriminate, taking aim at rich elites and the gullible public, at Hollywood, Washington, and every piece of America in between, and ultimately, at the underhanded power of rhetoric and propaganda.
[2006] Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: Though the humor is more off-color than my tastes dictate, this mockumentary is more in the vein of Rick Mercer Talks to Americans, Cunk on..., and Nathan Fielder's stuff. Sacha Baron Cohen has created a character that is meant as a caricature of "foreigners" in order to expose Western attitudes towards other countries, often capturing real 'Muricans agreeing with Borat's racist, antisemitic and misogynist comments, and believing he ISN'T a caricature because they don't know anything about the world. In that way, the film has only become more relevant over time, as those ignorant voices have since been amplified beyond measure. Cohen is trolling; they are being themselves. When Borat is alone, or with his "producer", they're serving a narrative and it stops feeling like a documentary, so I'm not sure how much of the original audience suffered the "last prank" of believing the doc was real (even if the credits reveal it, there are many people who aren't particularly cine-literate). We're always punching up here, though I know Kazakhstan didn't exactly love it.
[2007] 3:10 to Yuma: James Mangold's remake of the 1957 film is something of a trade-off, and I'm not sure it entirely wins in the exchange. I'd call the original a moral thriller, and this one an action western, filling the escort of an outlaw (Russell Crowe) with violence and explosions, and only getting to the moral dilemmas late in the game. Christan Bale's rancher is the more complex character, a wounded veteran with a family to feed and mounting debts to a land baron, desperate enough to leverage the escort to fix his problems. His son is along for the ride this time and acts as an important catalyst, an inspiration, perhaps to both men. The movie really, really wants Australia's two enfants terribles to be buddies despite being polar opposites, and that push leads to some poorly-justified actions. There's a harder-edged ending, by which point, we simply have to accept the outlaw's characterization, but since the movie was well-received, I'll also have to accept that most audiences didn't have a problem with it. I personally prefer the tense Western Noir version, but the remake is still a solid modern western.
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