THE UPSIDE (2019)

Rated:  PG-13

STARS: Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, Nicole Kidman, Julianna Margulies
DIRECTOR:  Neil Burger
GENRE: Comedy/ Drama

There are multiple factors to consider when evaluating a film: story line...acting... cinematography...soundtrack. Sometimes one stands out and makes up for weaknesses in the other areas. In The Upside, a remake of the hit French film from 2011--The Intouchables (reviewed here)--it's the personnel on hand. The quality cast. 

To wit: Bryan Cranston, who plays Phillip, a quadriplegic billionaire (a paragliding accident has him permanently confined to the chair). Cranston does all of his acting from the neck up. No easy feat.

Kevin Hart brings his comedic instincts to the part of Dell, the man who gets hired as Phillip's caretaker and companion. Dell is totally unqualified for the position. He lives on the fringes of the law and he's way behind on his child support payments. He doesn't even want the job--he's just out collecting signatures  to appease his parole officer--until he learns how much it pays. Phillip sees something in him that represents rebellion. Freedom. Adventure. It will happen.

Hart plays Dell as a hapless slacker. In the original film, Dell's counterpart, "Driss," is portrayed by Omar Sy. He's more of a thuggish, straight-ahead tough guy. So there's a different tone to the character. There are laughs in both versions, but in The Upside Hart is spoon-feeding them to us (like he haphazardly spoon feeds Philip).  But every film should stand on its own, and as we all know, movies that are"based" on a book or a true story or another film often fiddle with the particulars.

Nicole Kidman is Phil's gal Friday, who is staunchly opposed to the hiring of Dell in the beginning. I think of Kidman as our finest living actress. I came to this mindset after viewing her fiery performance in Eyes Wide Shut. Since then I've examined her work with a more critical eye, and she is the real deal. Here she is looking radiant and almost school-girlish, belying her 51 years on the planet. 

The exquisite Julianna Margulies as Phil's pen pal rounds out the cast. Their dinner meeting together is  bittersweet, and marks the turning point in the film. 

All that and you get Aretha Franklin singing opera in the background! That's different.

I gave The Intouchables an "A" grade. I like the remake almost as much as the original.

Grade: B +

JILL'S TAKE

When I went to see The Upside, I had some pro and con prejudices about the actors. Con Kevin Hart (too attention-grabbing) and pro Bryan Cranston (AKA William White in "Breaking Bad"). By the end, my preconceived opinions were eradicated.

This seems to be the year of movies featuring totally opposite characters who become bosom buddies, i.e. Green Book and now The Upside. (It all began with Stanley Kramer's 1958 classic The Defiant Ones with convicts Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, eventually learning to trust, even like each another.)

There have been some great films about quadriplegics. To name two of my favorites,The Sea Inside (2004, Javier Bardem) and The Sessions (2012, Helen Hunt). I will now add The Upside to this list. It's a totally engrossing film with more humor, much more, than those other two....

Sure, there are some unbelievable moments but once you buy into the premise, it's a fun ride. When Hart's character earns a $50,000 check for a painting and spends it on a fancy automobile and two apartments in NYC my practical side scoffed. (I kept thinking of my niece's daughter who pays $2500 a month for a 500 sq. ft. studio in lower Manhattan.) And some of the antics (car chases, paragliding, etc.) seemed a bit hard to imagine for someone as physically compromised as Cranston's character. But imagine them I did – and was much the happier for the experience.

Emotionally, I'd like to give The Upside an A. But a small part of me feels it was too happy and upside-ish for the actual situation. I'd love to know how a quadriplegic viewer would react.

Grade: B +

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS--2010

Rated : R

Stars: Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal

Director: Edward Zwick

Genre: drama/comedy/romance

Okay, so the obvious selling point of Love and Other Drugs--based on Jamie Reidy's memoir: Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman-- is Anne Hathaway in the altogether. Which is altogether not a bad reason to watch, even if you don't like anything else about the movie. But I think you will.

Jamie (Jake Gyllenhall) is a hotshot drug rep for Pfizer during the mid nineties. He accosts doctors in parking lots, or, with a mixture of sexual charm and bravado, cons his way past their receptionists to slip his anti-depressant samples onto the ol' docs shelves. It's all a game--played much in the manner of Washington lobbyists who wield their influence over our lawmakers--to get the MDs to prescribe his drugs over some other rep's drugs.

Jamie bribes one of the docs to take him on as an "intern," and subsequently gets to be in the room when Maggie, (Anne Hathaway) a young woman dealing with premature onset Parkinson's disease, takes her boob out for a quick inspection. You know right there that this is the beginning of a budding romance.

Jake and Maggie begin a sex only relationship, because she is the type who won't allow anyone to love her because she perceives complications down the line due to her medical condition. But all that sex (and Hathaway is as believably real in the bedroom as she is anyplace else) brings them to the brink of wanting something deeper, but not letting on that they want something deeper, because that might spoil the party. It's your classic boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-has-to-fight-to-get-girl-back tale. And even though Love and Other Drugs is a drama, there are some choice comic moments as well--especially when Jake gets the go ahead to promote Viagra, the new wonder drug that's "lifting the spirits" of men everywhere !

Love and Other Drugs is also an indictment of a system that uses MDs as the middle-men--glorified drug pushers if you will-- to turn us into a nation of addicts and reap enormous profits for the pharmaceutical companies. That's why every other commercial on TV now exhorts you to "ask your doctor" about the benefits of some prescription drug with a laundry list of side-effects (like death) that are way worse than the condition you'd be treating. (And every day the lawyers are on there drumming up business from clients whose lives have been devastated by Accutane, or some other dangerous product that never should have been approved in the first place.) But our nation of zombies--especially vulnerable seniors-- keeps on popping those pills by the handful. If that isn't shameful enough, look at what they've done--in collaboration with the school system--to our hyperactive kids.

End of rant.

There's plenty of sex and lots of drugs in Love and Other Drugs...the only thing missing for baby boomers is the rock n roll. Play the movie, then go put on the Stones...and you'll feel complete.

Grade: B +

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER--2010

Rated: R

Stars: Gemma Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas, Lucy Punch, Freida Pinto

Director: Woody Allen

Genre: Drama/comedy

There are no single, lonely people at the beginning of Woody Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger-- just married and lonely people--ready and ripe to fall under someone else's spell and rekindle the fire of romance that all too quickly peters out in the day to day reality of monogamous "bliss."

Helena (Gemma Jones) is a ditzy old gal who has been divorced by Alfie, (Anthony Hopkins) and now she's seeing a "fortune teller" who tells her just what she wants to hear. Alfie falls for a young opportunistic prostitute named Charmaine, (Lucy Punch) who likes the finer things in life that he can provide her--as long as his money holds out! Alfie and Helena's daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) is married to once promising--but now frustrated--writer Roy, (Josh Brolin) who has an eye for the exotic young guitar player in the window across the way, Dia (Freida Pinto from Slumdog Millionaire). Sally, who works at a high-profile art gallery, develops a thing for her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas).

But are they all delusional?

In You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Woody Allen is exploring the idea of faith, or more accurately, the tendency that many of us have to want to believe in something--often another person--to the point where we are willing to believe only what we want to believe, and don't confuse us with the facts.

Woody's endearing (at least to me) brand of cynicism tinged with irony is all over this one--his fourth in a row set in London--but the sense that he is literally speaking through his characters, so apparent in some previous films, (I could close my eyes and hear his voice, even through his female characters, which was freaky) isn't present here--perhaps refreshingly so.

Quite an impressive cast he's assembled--and Gemma Jones is a hoot as Helena, who goes on ad nauseam about reincarnation as if she'd never heard of the concept before... happy as a clam because her psychic has told her she has lived before and will live again. (Not everyone--the Buddhists for example--are pleased about that wheel turning round and round and going back, Jack, and doing it again!)

But it's Lucy Punch as Charmaine--the happy hooker supposedly gone straight who is now Alfie's wife-- still playing him for all he's worth while maintaining an air of bewildered innocence, even when he catches her in the act with some young buck, who upstages them all.

Anthony Hopkins, who I never thought was very scary as Hannibal Lecter, is more believably cast as a guy who's extending his mid-life crisis--and all the delusional flamboyance that goes along with that-- into his golden years.

And there's a delicious twist at the end of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger that reinforces Woody Allen's philosophical bent that oft-times you can't win for losing.

GRADE: B