Thumbnails Dec 19

by Tony Medley

Knives Out (8/10): 130 minutes. PG-13. It was hard to believe that this Agatha Christie-type mystery was 10 minutes over two hours because it keeps moving throughout without one slow minute. Highlighted by a captivating performance by Daniel Craig imagining Hercule Poirot as a Southerner, aided by a fine cast of supporting actors and actresses, including Chris Evans, Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Plummer, and Don Johnson the twists come one after another along with a bewitching lightness.

The Good Liar (8/10): 109 minutes. R. Con man Roy Courtnay (Ian McKellan) puts the move on rich widow Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren) through an online dating service. Roy is a smooth old codger and Betty is bewitched. I feel sorry for the people who have read the novel (not that it’s not a good one) because they know from the outset what’s going on. I didn’t read it and, as a result, enjoyed this immensely. Mirren gives her usual award-quality performance, but so does McKellan. Although it’s mostly talk, Condon directs with a fine sense of pace. This is a good one, despite a huge plot hole that most won’t notice.

Ford v Ferrari (8/10): 150 minutes. PG-13. While entertaining with good racing sequences, this plays fast and loose with the truth. As just two examples, it paints Ford Executive Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) as a villain when there is very little evidence of that and makes driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) look like a malcontent when the truth is just the opposite. Both actors give award quality performances. It’s disappointing that Hollywood always seems to take such liberties to “beef up” a story that doesn’t need any beefing.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (8/10): 108 minutes. PG. Tom Hanks gives his finest performance in this biopic that adds strong supporting performances by Matthew Rhys and Chris Cooper, among others. It’s hard to believe that a man is this pure but this film started with a standup by Mr. Rogers’ widow, Joanne, vouching for it. Telling the story of a troubled magazine writer doing an article on him as a vehicle to tell Mr. Rogers’ story is uniquely effective to capture the essence of an astonishingly good man.

Scandalous: The Story of the National Enquirer (8/10): 96 minutes. NR. Gene Pope, Jr., wanted to emulate his father, a “made man” in the New York Mafia who ran an Italian newspaper there, so bought another New York paper, with money supplied by Mafia chieftain Frank Costello, renamed it The National Enquirer and moved its headquarters to Florida. He made the paper insanely successful as a tabloid sold in supermarkets and filled the paper with “inquiring” journalists who dug up the dirt on celebrities. This is a fascinating documentary about what was at one time a hugely popular paper.

Very Ralph (8/10): 108 minutes. NR. This is an intriguing look at designer Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz). While Ralph was not trained in fashion, Woody Allen sums his accomplishments up well, “The key to his success is an instinctive understanding that his taste spoke for millions and millions of people. It wasn’t trying to figure out what they liked; it was what he liked. He was betting that what he liked, they would like. And he was very, very right.” (HBO).

Midway (3/10):138 minutes. PG-13. This fits right in with the old hokey B movies that Hollywood churned out by the dozens during WWII, including the platitudinous dialogue. The first hour plus is so uninvolving and clichéd it’s soporific. Directed by Roland Emmerich who is responsible for The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and White House Down (2013), two of the dumbest movies I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure, it should not come as a surprise that this film is so poorly done. The only reason I don’t give this terrible film a zero is because the attack by the dive bombers on the Japanese aircraft carriers is very well done. It shows the harrowing danger of diving to bomb a ship in the face of immense anti-aircraft bullets that were being thrown at them. It’s amazing that any of them survived but it certainly emphasizes the courage of the pilots who kept on coming. The rest of the movie is an insult to what is one of the great battles in the history of the world (like virtually ignoring Torpedo Squadron 8 that lost all 16 planes and all the truly heroic pilots but one).

Charlie’s Angels (2/10): 120 minutes. R. I guess women want to prove they can do anything a man can do, including making senseless “action” films that have no raison d'être. Director Elizabeth Banks has done it in spades with this movie. It’s got all the stuff men put in their puerile action movies, ridiculous car chases, fights delivering one killing blow after another with the combatants always jumping up for more virtually unscathed, banal dialogue that is intended to be clever, scenes that make no sense whatever, falls that defy physics, papier-mâché characters, etc., etc., etc. This is a film without reason, wit, or charm.