Easy does it in this absorbing Netflix series

I'm not in the habit of binge-watching Netflix series. In fact I can only remember one I've done before, Catastrophe (see Sept. 22 2023 post), which apparently was only available in the UK, where I was travelling at the time. Last week I found an equally engrossing one, Easy.  Created and directed by Joe Swanberg, the three season series tells the stories of a myriad cast of characters, pretty much all of a certain age (Millennials) and proclivities (creative). Some were based on Swanberg's friends and circles he no doubt runs in.  Some are recurring between episodes or show up in others' stories or obliquely in entirely different plots or episodes. All are bright, articulate, introspective, liberal, open-minded and in many ways self-obsessed. Does the word narcissism come to mind? Many are couples. Seemingly every episode pivots around conflict, either within themselves or others related to love, friendship, lifestyle or career. The scenarios can be dramatic or humorous or both. Some specific storylines revolve around sexuality, passively-aggressively interacting with one another, insensitively undermining someone's psyche. Even more pedestrian storylines but ones deliciously told such as a teenager giving her church-going parents a lesson in humility, or neighbors trying to chase down a porch pirate.  Storylines can border on the wild and transgressive, such as when a techie at a closed circuit camera shop plays PI and finds himself in a BDSM party. Some of the more prominent recurring characters are Andi (Elizabeth Reaser) and Kyle (Michael Chernus), who experiment with an open marriage with varying results. Or Jacob (Marc Maron), an intense older graphic novelist who exploits personal relationships for his art. I found every one of these 25 episodes absorbing. The stories take place in Chicago, with hip restaurants, bars and coffee houses serving as backdrops. These actors, none of whom were familiar to me, are stunningly good, the scenes and writing flawless. I did look up one of the most memorable characters, Jane Adams as Annabelle Jones. Turns out she played Dr. Mel Karnofsky on Frasier; age and lifestyle have much changed her.  

Oscars - no; three great movies - yes

As per not my want I didn't watch the Academy Awards. I never do, nor do I even look forward to them and this year read nothing about the nominations. I was so turned off or bored with most of what was on offer I  had no interest. And when I saw Anora winning as predicted - it's hard to miss a headline - I almost felt physically sick. (See my Dec. 30 post). Instead I spent the evening watching old, and well, classic films, that showcased good stories and good acting. The first was It's My Turn (Claudia Weill, 1980) with Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas. Clayburgh, in her prime, stars as Kate, a college mathematician at odds with the man in her life, Homer, played by the irascible Charles Grodin, and meets ex-pro ball player Ben (Michael

Douglas). It was refreshing to see Clayburgh again. What struck me is her charisma of cuteness undercut by the seriousness of the "nobody's fool" variety. Douglas, dark black hair and beard, looked very young.....The next film was Frankie and Johnny (Garry Marshall 1991) with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, based on the Terrance McNally play. Wow, can these two act!  Pfeiffer and Pacino are effortless in this push-pull romance with Frankie's (Pfeiffer) simmering and outright doubt to Johnny's engrossing honesty. I kept thinking: Pacino, an actor's actor, the Method School, etc. And Pfeiffer ain't so bad herself......The third film (part of Criterion Channel's New York

Love Stories) was Carol (Todd Haynes 2015). I forgot I'd never seen this when it came out and Cate Blanchett as the title character is currently my fave actress. Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel - so you know there's something to it - the film is about an illicit and smoldering attraction in the early 1950s. Blanchett plays opposite Rooney Mara as Therese. This slow-paced and nuanced drama is just right, underlined by Carter Burwell's melancholy score.

Bridget charms, ho hum, a fourth time. But there's another...

I was ambivalent about seeing the fourth Bridget Jones movie (I've seen them all) but being in a Spanish town where it was an accessible English movie, and the time of day was right, I paid my Euros and sauntered into Puerto Banus' Red Dog Cinemas. The film Mad About the Boy (dir. Michael Morris) was in original English with Spanish subtitles ('VOSE'). There were only about a dozen in attendance on a sunny Costa afternoon and, yup, mainly women, with a good variety holding glasses of white wine - hilarious. But the "print" (isn't everything digital?) had a sepia bleached out look that made it difficult to watch. Nevertheless our girl, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) was back. Now 55 and a widow after the love of her life (Darcy - Colin Firth) died as a humanitarian aid worker. Friends coax her to try to start anew. But you know how it is for "women of a certain age." But one day an Adonis in the name of Roxster (Leo Woodall) comes to her aid embarrassingly on the Hampstead Heath (I guessed the movie was filmed in Hampstead - ain't I good?). Her gal pals - and women in the audience - swoon at the new boy toy (especially his doffing of a wet white shirt). All goes, initially, according to plan and our girl is in seventh (sexual) heaven. The film has generally had good response but what Bridget film hasn't through I found Bridget Jones Baby (2016, Sharon Maguire) a little dull. But maybe that's because I was in a Paris cinema expecting the movie to be in English! Let's face it, Zellweger is perfect in the role playing the frumpish awkward singleton that LOADS of women, even beautiful ones, can identify with. Though in reality Zellweger is a sex bomb and in personal life has wrapped arms with some of the biggest names in show biz. I'll give this film three and half out of five stars because its script is tight, it is overall sprightly though some of the characters are forced (think school teacher Wallaker - Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the whole genre is getting a bit repetitive. 

It just so happened that the night before, on Criterion Channel, I caught the same Z girl in a 2003 film Down with Love (Peyton Read), a hilarious take on the old Rock Hudson - Doris Day movies, full of misunderstandings in the then battle of the sexes. Doris Day a feminist icon? Think about it. I hadn't heard of the film or had forgotten about it or it didn't get wide distribution. Anyway, it was great to see a pretty accurate re-creation of the early 1960s - fashions, sets and even hackneyed era dialogue - with Ewan McGregor in the Rock Hudson role. Even Tony Randall, RIP, stars. The Z girl shines as she usually does in a movie worth seeing because it's a modern throwback that's pretty accurately done. 

Is my desire for movies fading?

Is my desire for movies fading? Lately, after rather a full fall season of seeing some of the most talked-about films, am I losing my desire to go to the local cinema (there’s Windsor’s new Landmark though it’s playing the same films as our other two cineplexes, Criterion Channel or Netflix, not to mention hometown Windsor film festival’s monthly series)? Perhaps it’s because I was disappointed if not put off by some of the biggest titles. I loathed Anora (Sean Baker), which could end up sweeping the Oscars, about a Russian expatriate drug dealer and a Brooklyn hooker who go on a wild drug-fueled ride through the neverlands of New York. Why glorify this depravity? I was looking forward to Conclave (Edward Berger & Peter Straughan), the politicized maneuvers of electing a new pope, which admittedly had sound acting and stunning visuals but cardboard liberal and conservative stereotypes and a damp squid of an ending. Or The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) with Demi Moore as a washed-up TV host paranoid about her declining looks and her transmogrification into a younger double with enough sticky entrails on the floor to last me a lifetime. Bird (Andrea Arnold) was a sickening claustrophobic story about an off the rails father-daughter relationship; I’m surprised I lasted through it. Maria (Pablo Larraín) was okay but just, with Angelina Jolie reprising the famed Maria Callas in her melancholy sunset years. I did enjoy – okay, Joy (Ben Taylor), a Brit film about the scientific team pioneering IVF - and the equally English We Live in Time (John Crowley), a slow burn romantic drama with subtle above par acting. Other notables were Speak No Evil (James Watkins), a gripping real life type horror story and Nightbitch (Marielle Heller), a horror story about marriage starring Amy Adams. But I avoided both Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) and Queer (Luca Guadagnino) because these seemed gratuitously sexual flavors of the month. I loved A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg) (see review below), A Different Man (Arnold Schimberg) and The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi), the latter two starring the extraordinary and (literally) pliable Sebastian Stan, the first because of its utter black comedy, the second because of its tour de force, even though I like Trump. But on the whole movies lately seem kind of a downer, listless and trying too hard with few compelling stories. For goodness sake, after discarding a myriad Netflix films this month I ended up watching Queen Bees (Michael Lembeck, 2021). At least it held my attention, kind of. 

The Mousetrap, the longest running play in the world

This isn’t about film, although people have tried to make films of it. (They can’t until the play ends, and it never has.) It’s about Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, the longest running murder mystery and theatrical play in the world. I caught it a week ago at London’s St. Martin’s Theatre (photo) in the West End. It’s one of those events that just begs for attending, such an iconic play staged in the middle of the city’s teeming theatre district. But to be honest, I had some reservations before going and had never checked it out on previous London visits, largely because I thought it was too cliched, pedestrian or touristy. It may be touristy – the Thursday matinee I attended was almost packed – but I was glad to have seen it, and in English parlance, it was a jolly good time. (The price was also reasonable compared to other West End productions - about 15 Pound or $30 Cad). Arriving at the vintage 1916 theatre on West St., a block off Charing Cross Rd. and just up from Leicester Sq., the audience was treated to live piano renditions of standards and vaudeville – how appropriate. Every year The Mousetrap changes its cast in late November, so I was treated to a fresh group of actors. The play is in two acts with an intermission. (I only learned later that the bar has a board indicating what number production this is; by last February it had run 29,500 times.) There are eight players and one virtual performer, a recorded voice reading the news on the radio by one of the original actors of the 1952 production. The play has never had many well-known actors, but Richard Attenborough was among its original cast. But this contingent was certainly good and kept the suspense going. The story all takes place in a country boarding house with a group of oddball guests who, of course, each has a reason to be the murderer, according to the investigating detective. Half the fun is watching the idiosyncratic personalities - an irritating complainer, a foreign dandy, a fey artist, a suffragette, a stiff-necked retired army major, and the two proprietors, a seemingly normal married couple. I was also expecting to be bored but wasn’t. The staging almost had a camp aspect likely because of the play’s long history, iconic status and engraved stereotypes. Nevertheless, it was fun all around and at the end the audience applauded loudly and even cheered. As the cast took their bows we were advised, as per tradition, to never reveal the ending of the whodunnit. My lips are sealed. 

The emphasis is on "pain." And what's with modern parents?

A Real Pain is of those movies that is absorbing simply by dint of its characters. In this case it would be director Jesse Eisenberg who plays David and Kieran Culkin as Benji. They’re American Jewish cousins on a Holocaust Remembrance tour of Poland. Sounds sad? Not really. And you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it, if enjoy is quite the right word. But this film is more fun than drama though leaves a poignant message, to the point my eyes welled up at the end. Benji and David are as different as chalk and cheddar, David the responsible family man and Benji the anarchic wild one. Benji is yin to David’s yang – you know. Both actors are at top of their game as the characters first meet for their flight to Poland. Benji loves to hang out in the air terminal hours ahead of time simply because it’s cool he can meet the weirdest people. Kind of like him. So wild is he that he picks up a pre-mailed package of marijuana he had sent to the Warsaw hotel, then finagles their way on to the roof top for a little relaxed toking. On the tour, Benji becomes enraged with the tour guide for being too sterile in his description of Holocaust facts. And he demands that David “feel” the loss or the “pain” of the Nazi horrors. “If now is not the time to grieve I don’t know what to tell you.”  On a train they evade the conductor by not paying fares and joke that’s the reason “our people” were kicked out of Poland for being too cheap. The title? Well, the guide (Will Sharpe) does say it’s “a tour about pain.” But is Benji the real pain? Is he psychotic? Manic depressive? The burning of the personal into the historical is what charges this movie, regardless of what he is.  

What is it about modern parents they don’t know how to bring up their kids? Two recent movies or TV series made me shake my head and scream at the doofuses who were portrayed as mothers and fathers. The first is Let Go (Josephine Bornebusch) on Netflix where the punk daughter constantly berates her parents including with obscenities like “You argue all the f---- time” and “What the f---were you thinking? The whole point of coming here is my f--- competition.” The dour compliant parents only talk softly and try to appease. Same with the new hit series A Man on the Inside (created by Michael Schur) with Ted Danson, and his grandkids being the utterly most desultory teens. I don’t believe in corporal punishment, but it just made me want to slap them - and the parents.

That's a wrap: 20th edition of the Windsor International Film Festival

Here are my capsule reviews of several films at this year’s 20th edition of the Windsor International Film Festival, which ends tonight. Congrats on yet another successful year for this amazing and uniquely Windsor event which just keeps growing and growing!

Bonjour Tristesse: this part-Canadian remake by Durga Chew-Bose of the Otto Preminger 1958 classic has Chloe Sevigny in the Deborah Kerr role as the snobbish high-class matron. Every frame is beautifully shot by Maximilian Pittner and I thought Sevigny pulled off the role well. The problem was the often-fleeting dialogues among the other characters that seemed as languorous as the sun-drenched setting. A Different Man: Aaron Schimberg’s black comedy has a lot of assets including an intriguing premise and great score. A film about physical deformity turns into a character study with a bizarre, yet not really satisfying, twist. Firebrand: Karim Aïnouz’s take on Henry VIII’s rebellious – and last – wife, Katherine Parr is all Jude Law as the old awful monarch, an award-winning role. Alicia Vikander as the Regent is stiff and the script doesn’t give her a lot to work with. But the sets are probably accurate about how physically uncomfortable the 16th century monarchy actually was. It’s Raining Men was the perfect star vehicle for up-and-coming French actress Laure Calamy and she’s perfect in a surprisingly formulaic film where all ends well and no harm is done; there’s even a burst-out music and dance scene. Anora (Sean Baker) won the Cannes Palme d’Or and it won the WIFF LiUNA People’s Choice award. But it really did nothing for me, this one note story about a Brooklyn sex worker Anora (Mikey Madison) who falls in love with the immature and drug-addled scion (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch and the ongoing craziness – with seemingly every third line having the f-word – of their relationship. But, ah, what do I know? Maria (Pablo Larrain) stars Angelina Jolie as the late great Greek opera singer Maria Callas but in the autumn of her life when she’s striving to make a comeback. It’s very atmospheric and Jolie is reasonably good but who steals the show is Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis. The Battle of St. Leonard is a fascinating documentary by Quebec filmmaker Félix Rose about a late 1960s language war between Montreal’s immigrant Italian community and French Quebecois. It marked an important milestone in that province’s quest for French equality and language rights though the main activist Raymond Lemieux paid an emotional price. Conclave by Edward Berger has the stars – Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto and Isabella Rossellini - the lush sartorial trappings of elite Cardinals and the magnificent backdrop of the Sistine Chapel. Yet the intrigue and political gamesmanship plot gives way to a bizarre unexpected twist and a less than satisfying outcome. Skincare (Austin Peters) stars the versatile Elizabeth Banks based on a true story of the rivalry between two estheticians which spirals out of all proportion and demonstrates the twists to which the human mind is capable.