Love & Friendship

First Hit:  Definitely funny and well-acted, however a bit more telling than showing.

This was a clever take on life in the late 1700’s. Women of a certain societal stature were to be taken care of by their wealthy husbands or their families.

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) has had a few dalliances in her life and is currently engage to Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), while having an intimate affair with a married Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearain). She’s looking for a way to both secure her future income while also securing the future of her daughter Frederica Vernon (Morfydd Clark).

They are basically homeless and stay at the homes of friends and relations until marriages are arranged and settled. Assisting Lady Susan, by being a sounding board to her manipulative plans, is American Alicia Johnson (Chole Sevigny) who continues to be threatened to be sent back to Connecticut by her husband (Stephen Fry) for colluding with Lady Susan.

At first Lady Susan was attempting to marry Frederica to a Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), who was rich, quite talkative, and very odd in his speaking and thought patterns. However, Frederica cannot stand him. From  here the story takes off.

The strongest aspects of this film were how they kept in the period, how it was shot and by clearly showing how manipulative people can be. However, this film did a lot of telling through the dialogue which got a bit monotonous at times.

Beckinsale was excellent as the intelligent manipulative Lady Susan. Clark was correspondingly strong as the daughter. Sevigny was great as Lady Susan’s confidant. Bennett was the hit of the film by stealing every scene he was in. Whit Stillman did a wonderful job of writing and directing this adaptation of the Jane Austen novella called “Lady Susan”.

Overall:  This film, especially Bennett, was very funny while also keeping a serious tone.

Holmes

First Hit:  A slow meandering beginning that builds momentum towards being a more interesting film at the end.

This film is about forgiveness, aging, kindness, facts and uncovering the real story of Sherlock Holmes.

We meet Sherlock (Ian McKellen) when he’s 93 years old. He’s retired, has difficulty remembering things, his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her son Roger (Milo Parker) are his only touch with the outside world.

He thinks that Mr. Watson reimagined his detective exploits into interesting books/stories. He’s hung up on his last case, what happened, and why he quit being a detective.

The film traces brief memories of what happened and when we do the film transports us back to that time. McKellen plays both parts and it almost works. Him being the doddering forgetful old man and the younger Sherlock who is logical and only thinking about and using the facts to deduce his actions. When he realizes the times in his life he could have been more compassionate, the film softens and lands beautifully.

McKellen was great as a 93 year old man whose faculties are failing him. His covering up his forgetfulness (looking at his sleeve for the boy’s name) juxtaposed with the times he’s feeling full of himself (swimming with Roger) was really good. Linney did great in a very restrained role where she eventually embraces her lot as Holmes rewards her loyalty. Parker was very strong as the curious, inventive, thoughtful, and independent boy and friend of Holmes. He was the best part of the film. Mitch Cullin and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a up and down script, which at times was too doddering. Bill Condon did a great job of sharing the beautiful English countryside and some of the interior shots were very effective. The story was too slow to start which I think he could have made different.

Overall:  A strong good film, but not in the upper echelon.

Maggie's Plan

First Hit:  Oddly interesting story about love, marriage and life through three very different personalities.

The three are Georgette (Julianne Moore), her husband John (Ethan Hawke) and Maggie (Greta Gerwig).

Georgette is a precise, egocentric professor that is focused on her career. She works at a prestigious university (Columbia) and her career path is to be well known and a department head. She has two children with John and abdicates most household care to him.

John works as a part time professor at a lesser college while also working on a novel. He’s famous for some of his anthropological work, but his heart is on writing a novel. On the campus he teaches, he meets fellow professor Maggie who believes she can only have relationships that last 6 months.

Because she wants children, she decides to get pregnant by asking a friend (mathematician) to give her his sperm that she can insert. However, she engages John in conversations and begins to give the attention he’s not getting at home. The relationship starts with John giving her sections of his book to review and ends in a marriage. However, things go array, the relationship changes and realizing that there needs to be a change she creates "Maggie’s Plan".

Moore is very solid as the precise, smart and career focused Georgette. Hawke is very good as the guy who continues to succumb to an illusion of what he wants and what love is. Gerwig is great as the main character who has a clear idea of what she wants and how to get it. Travis Fimmel and Maya Rudolph are very good as friends of Maggie. Rebecca Miller wrote and directed this quirky independent film in a sure handed way.

Overall:  I enjoyed the way this film played out.

Dark Horse

First Hit:  This is a very sweet film about a group of Welsh people from a small town having a once in a lifetime adventure.

There is a small Welsh mining town that has lost their major employer, the mining operations. Most of the people are poor and have little education. However, they’ve got desire, grit, and determination.

One such person Jan Vokes who works as a cleaner of a supermarket and wants more in her life. She comes up with an idea to own and train a horse, a thoroughbred. She finds a mare that has been put to pasture and convinces 30 other town members to be part of a syndicate to own a horse for a small monthly fee.

From this fee they buy the mare, find a stud, and after the birth of the colt house the horse at a training stable. At first no one thinks this young horse will amount to anything (it’s all legs), but over time the horse begins to show some progress.

They enter the horse in a few races and before they know it, it actually starts placing and winning a few of them. On the lead up to the second most important race in England the horse gets hurt. What will the consortium do? You’ll have to see the film.

Jan Vokes, Brian Vokes, Howard Davies, and Angela Davies are just four of the consortium and they bring out so much about the personality of the whole group and how one horse brought them together. Louise Osmond both wrote and directed this film and in its sweetness it is just a really enjoyable experience.

Overall:  This was such a wonderful experience to see real people engage with such love of purpose.

A Bigger Splash

First Hit:  This film lacked clarity of purpose partially because the actors and characters weren't well mixed in this uninteresting story.

The film starts with the illusion that Tilda Swinton (as Marianne Lane) is a middle age rock star still able to bring in stadium full audiences.

Attempting to convince the audience through brief clips of a stadium filled with rock fans, the band on the stage, and Lane, with a black wig, comes out to the microphone was inadequate. We don’t hear her sing nor do we hear her music.

This lacked credibility, and Swinton’s look and presence didn’t carry the energy of a stadium filling rock star. The audience is asked to take this at face value, what makes this worse is that we do not get to hear her speak because she’s just had throat surgery and isn’t supposed to speak so her character's story is limited.

Because she has these two strikes against her, it is like the old saying, "two wrongs to make a right". She’s vacationing with her husband Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) at some unknown rural (possibly Mediterranean) location where the village is small and population sparse.

Unbeknownst to Paul and Marianne, her old boyfriend and former music producer Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) is coming to visit them. Harry talks all the time and he’s full of hyper energy, takes over every conversation, and makes a big scene everywhere he is.

Although Marianne is more interested in seeing Hawkes, Paul,  even though he and Harry are lifelong friends, doesn't. Overall, it appears they’d rather not have him as a guest, but no one stops the madness. The madness begins at one of the first scenes when they pick him up at the airport by surprising them by bringing his underage unknown daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson).

The rest of the film attempts to extrapolate each of their personalities given their restricted behavior. However, I never felt that their relationships with themselves were real or flushed out, nor were their connections with each other valid. One of the few good scenes was Harry’s lip-syncing and dancing to the Rolling Stones' classic song “Emotional Rescue”.

One of the more painful scenes was the horrible karaoke singing and dancing by Harry and Marianne in a local bar.

Swinton was miscast in this role because there is just no way she resembled or acted as a stadium rock and roll star. Adding to this that she wasn’t supposed to speak, which added to the difficulty in making her believable. Fiennes was also miscast as there is no way he could pull off being this obnoxious, unthinking, arrogant, producer. He carries too much integrity and therefore it didn’t work. Schoenaerts was good and the best part of the film. His character was believable as a brooding, somewhat depressive, friend and mate of Harry and Marianne respectively. Johnson was mediocre as the young girl who was manipulative and questioning of her father and his friends. She didn’t make me believe her as a seductress – it was way to obvious. David Kajganich wrote a very mediocre screenplay that didn’t really dive into the characters and their history. Every setup of the character's history seemed too overt and lacking curiosity. A film audience needs to be curious about the characters. Luca Guadagnino directed this and probably made the most of the story as written. The casting was, for the most part, poor.

Overall:  I was bored by the story, actors, and the way this film unfolded.