CAFE SOCIETY (2016)

STARS: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Blake Lively
DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
GENRE: Drama

When we buy a ticket to a Woody Allen film we know that he will be dispensing his philosophy on life, love, sex and mortality through his characters. As I've mentioned in previous reviews, we can often close our eyes when a character is speaking and see him standing right there--the voice of the master coming through loud and clear. (Allen narrates the story as we go along as well.) 

It's an acquired taste. But for true aficionados, Cafe Society will provide some very pleasant rewards--offering up a sumptuous feast of fine acting performances, gorgeous milieu, and a nostalgic soundtrack of classics from the 1930s.

Young New Yorker Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) heads to Hollywood seeking gainful employment, hitting on his big shot talent agent uncle Phil (Steve Carell), who eventually takes him under his wing. Phil's assistant, Vonnie, (Kristen Stewart) gives Bobby the nickel tour of the Hollywood scene, and before you know it he's smitten by her. After some initial coyness, she takes a shine to him as well. But Vonnie has divided loyalties, and I won't spoil what that is all about for you. 

The scene will shift to New York, where Bobby's gangster brother, Ben, runs a posh nightclub. Bobby hires on there, and matures into a suave and debonair thirties kinda guy. He marries the alluring Veronica (Blake Lively), and all seems well until his past shows up one day at the club, and divided loyalties once again becomes the watchword of Cafe Society.

Jessie Eisenberg is the Peter Pan of Hollywood. Now 33 years old, he continues to play characters in their early twenties and gets away with it.  He is totally believable here as the callow kid who heads out west, and again as the smooth talking nightclub denizen--looking more like his chronological years. (I wonder if they had to "age" him cosmetically to make him look like what he really is. Bizarre.) 

Kristen Stewart imbues her character with a sweetness and a vulnerability I haven't seen from her before ( recalling her sizzling turn in On The Road from 2012.)  

And it's Steve Carell in another understated role, proving himself an actor with depth, as I'm sure he must still feel the urge sometimes to break out into the comic persona that established his greatness for a long while, but he seems more fond of the straight face nowadays.

Cafe Society drew me into its world of elegance and style, and a pre-war kind of innocence that, if you're like me, you may never want to leave. 

GRADE:  B +

JILL'S TAKE

Phooey! Tim made all the points I was going to make. I absolutely loved this film and I'm not necessarily a Woody Allen fan. (Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Deconstructing Harry, to name a few of my thumbs downers.) But this film was romantic to the max with what I like to call 'Jewish realism.' Yes, the actors were brilliant. And yes, the sets and the costumes--especially the jazz singer wearing a huge peacock-feathered beret were spot on! But in my view the best character of all was -- the score.

Allen chose wisely, using sentimental tunes like "Tea For Two" while showing a freshly murdered corpse being dumped into a cement-mixing grave. If ever there was a film where the music manipulated the audience's emotions, Café Society takes the cake. Of course, as an excellent clarinet player himself, Allen's musical knowledge knows no bounds.

Although this has nothing to do with the movie, I want to make a point. When I told a friend I was looking forward to seeing Woody Allen's latest, he bristled. "Not me, I refuse to see any of that creep's movies, considering how he's conducted his personal life!" I said nothing. But I think it's worth mentioning. For me, talent trumps dysfunction. I know other movie-goers who won't see a movie if the actor's political views don't jibe with their own. How sad. They often don't know what they're missing.

Anyhoo, back to Café Society. I'd like to give it an "A" grade but, to be honest, I'd probably give any well-written dramedy an "A" right now due to the dearth of any decent summer films....

GRADE: B+ 
(sorry to be such a copycat, Tim)

STILL ALICE (2014)

Rated: PG-13

Stars:  Julianne Moore,  Alec Baldwin,  Kristen Stewart,  Kate Bosworth 
Director: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
Genre: Drama

It was no surprise to most that Julianne Moore collected the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Alice Howland, a linguistics professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer's at age 50.  Alice begins to forget words--especially disturbing to someone in her position. She gets lost while out jogging in familiar places. This is how it begins.

There is no cure for this insidious disease, and you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy. So how it ends is not pretty. But we go on this journey with Alice because it's not just a tale of an individual and her slow deterioration, it's a story about family dynamics and how deeply they can be affected.

Alice is married to a medical professional (Alec Baldwin) and has three grown children. When a family conference is called to break the news of her diagnosis, the kids have no clue, and at first ask their parents if they are breaking up. They are blindsided. To make the scene even more cringe-worthy, Alice has to inform them that her particular brand of the disease is familial, meaning there's a fifty-fifty chance it could be passed on to the kids--one of whom is about to drop twins upon the world!

There is a chilling scene where Alice, in the early stages of her condition, records a video message to her future self, with instructions on what to do when things get to a certain stage. Will she or won't she follow through becomes the only real story question in Still Alice--which, like the disease itself,  proceeds to its foregone and inevitable conclusion. 

One of the other good performances here is turned in by Kristen Stewart, as Alice's aspiring actress daughter, who makes the decision to detour from her career and step up to become her mother's primary caregiver. 

Alec Baldwin gives a toned-down turn as the husband who is trying to do the right thing at every turn. There is one scene where he begins to get a little cranky, and I'm sitting there saying THERE...there's the REAL Alec Baldwin! 

I wouldn't be honest if I didn't tell you up front that Still Alice is a depressing movie.  But no less than a must-see. Because it's one that will make you think. 

Think about living every moment to the fullest. 

Grade:  B +

JILL'S TAKE

I haven't been this disturbed by a movie since Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Still Alice doesn't pretty up this awful disease one bit. And Julianne Moore doesn't pretty herself up, either. It is a searingly honest portrayal. One that is, at times, difficult to watch. As she deteriorates, so do we. I especially winced when her character was unable to find the bathroom in her own home, one she had lived in for years. As someone who prides herself on using just the right word or phrase, this film really got to me. And since I'm of an age where healthy forgetfulness happens all too frequently, the idea of losing total use of my brain is frankly terrifying.

That being said, Still Alice is a masterful piece of filmwork. Directors Brian Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (yes, two directors) played with our eyes as well as our minds by fading in and out of focus at unexpected intervals. Sort of like the way Julianne Moore's character was lucid one moment and in a fog the next.

This is not a movie for the faint of heart. The day Tim and I went to see it, there were mostly seniors in the audience. It got me wondering if its effect on a younger audience would be as life-threatening. Probably not. The list of celebrities who have suffered from this cruel disease is frightening. Ronald Reagan is probably the most famous victim. But there are others from the film community whose brilliance slowly faded into nothingness: Otto Preminger, Dana Andrews, Charles Bronson, Arlene Francis, Mike Frankovic, Rita Hayworth, Charleton Heston, Burgess Meredith, Edmond O'Brien, too many to name...

For a sobering experience, go see Still Alice.

Grade: B

ON THE ROAD (2012)

Rated: R

Stars: Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi, Tom Sturridge

Director: Walter Salles

Genre: Drama/Arthouse


The first thing I want to see at the beginning of a period movie is that the sets and the hairstyles and clothing of the actors is reflective of that era. In other words, to feel that I am authentically THERE. Otherwise, it's pretty stupid to ask you to believe you are watching a scene from the late forties, for example, when all the primary characters have contemporary looking hair styles. It's like they time traveled BACK to that era as their current selves, rather than being the authentic folks FROM that era. Some may think that's a relatively minor point, but I don't. And that's the first thing that irks me about On The Road, the film adaptation of beat poet Jack Kerouac's novel of "high" adventure in late forties and early fifties America.

I read the novel some time back, but if you are unfamiliar with it, you'll need to keep in mind that in the book--as it is in the film--that Kerouac has thinly disguised himself as a character called Sal Paradise, (Sam Riley) and his close friend Neal Cassady,(Garrett Hedlund) as Dean Moriarty. The third primary character is Cassady's free-spirited wife, Marylou (Kristen Stewart). 

Okay, here it comes again...they didn't even try...they didn't even TRY to do anything with Stewart's straightish, beyond shoulder-length hair that looks the same in the movie as it looks in any current publicity shot of her. That's the end of my rant, except that I've posted a picture of what women's hairstyles really looked like in the forties at the head of this review. 

So now they're all off to look for America in a drugged-up haze of weed fumes, Benzedrine and bongo drums. On The Road the movie is, like the book, a rambling recounting of aimless bohemian youth in all its hedonistic glory. It's evident that everyone involved in this production is trying real hard to bring off the unbringable and recreate the spontaneous, frenetic feel of the book, and to an extent they succeed. 

Kristen Stewart, whom up until now has been associated with a variety of vacuous vampire flicks, loses her adolescent image-- along with her duds--as a seductive predecessor to the free love movement of the sixties with a couple of steamy, revealing scenes,including a menage a trois with Paradise and Moriarty. 

Heglund is well cast as Moriarty/Cassady, but Sam Riley as Paradise/Kerouac just felt WRONG! Jack Kerouac had a kind of Boston "blue collar-ness" to him, and a bit of an edge to his personality that Riley--who comes off as slightly effeminate in the role--simply did not bring.

A bevy of household names are here in either small roles or cameos, including Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, and Steve Buscemi. Seems they all wanted to be a part of something legendary. The book is legendary, the movie is not, but On The Road--your quintessential arthouse film-- becomes more fascinating as it snakes and weaves recklessly along its way to a sobering conclusion. 

Grade:  C +

FROM THE DISTAFF SIDE--Jill's Take!

[In case Tim doesn't include this in his introduction, I'm his bona fide movie buddy. We see everything together—and agree on nothing. That's what prompted the idea of me adding my two cents in writing rather than bending his ear in the parking lot.]

I'm usually very quick to have opinions, and strong ones. But ON THE ROAD left me wondering how I felt about it. Hairstyles be damned, it was long and disjointed. And I should have hated it. Only I didn't. And the embarrassing thing is, I can't really tell you why. Except that the film created a kind of innocence of the era. No cell phones, no seat belts. There's a scene—it won't ruin the movie for you—where Sal Paradise/Sam Riley goes into a mom-and-pop store to steal some food and the clerk says he'll be right back, heading for the supply room. Would that happen today? No way. The clerk would probably have a gun hidden below the cash register. I much preferred the road scenes to the endless pot-smoking orgies. Yes, the film meandered. And yes, the main character was nobody I'd ever empathize with. But for once in our joint movie history, I'd rate this flick higher than my male cohort. If for no other reason than to watch all those megastars—especially Steve Buscemi as a smarmy closet gay, and naked-from-the-rear Viggo Mortensen—making quickie appearances.

Grade: B

ADVENTURELAND

Adventureland is about the purgatory where young people reside in the often rudderless space of summers off from school--a sort of poor man's American Graffiti for the 80's.

James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) has been accepted at Columbia grad school, but his dad's been demoted at his job and is claiming poverty--which means that James will have to hang around and find a job to earn his own money for journalism school. He gets hired at Adventureland, a low budget amusement park where nobody is allowed to win the giant stuffed pandas because they only have a couple of them left.

James meets co-worker Em, (Emily) played by Kristen Stewart. They hit it off right away and begin something of an innocent romance. James is the sensitive type who treats girls with honor and respect--and remains a virgin--while the "dangerous" guys, who are sometimes married, do most of the scoring in the wonderful game that we know as love. That's where Mike Connell, (Ryan Reynolds) the hot looking--but married--maintenance guy at Adventureland comes in.

Em has some obvious self-worth issues and has had this ongoing sexual relationship with Connell. They often rendezvous in the basement of his mother's house to do their thing for the five or ten minutes he can break away from his wife. We can see that this makes Em feel dirty, but it's just the type of scenario that those with low self-esteem are sometimes drawn to.

But now, Em has James (he's got it bad for her) to provide for her emotional needs. It's great to have SOMEONE who adores you when you feel unworthy. (Then again, it's hard to guess how any of these characters REALLY feel because there's so much weed being smoked in this movie you might get a contact high just sitting in the theatre.) Em just hopes that James won't find out about Connell because she can't seem to break her addiction to the ALL PURPOSE handyman.

But you know that he will.

There are comedic moments in this flick--mostly centered around the quirkiness of the park itself. The clientele are on the lowbrow side--they chuck their trash anywhere but in the proper receptacle--and the owner deals with one agitated customer by wielding a baseball bat and shouting, JUST GIVE ME A REASON!

The games at Adventureland are rigged, like the derby hats glued to these dummy's heads so there's no way anyone hurling a baseball can knock them off. In the end, it's about taking what life throws at us and moving on--hopefully becoming a little wiser for the knock on the head.

GRADE: B+

TIMMY'S TIDBITS: Kristen Stewart first got noticed by a talent scout at a grade school Christmas play at the age of eight ( I played a TREE in "Jack and the Beanstalk." It wasn't too challenging...I just had to stand there with leaves in my hair).

Ryan Reynolds started an improv comedy group called "Yellow Snow" in his hometown of Vancouver. (No, Susie--it doesn't come from yellow clouds).