Downton Abbey

First Hit: This film attempted to be significant in scope and ended up small and lacked being an engaging story.

I never watched any of this series on television as every preview just looked trite and uninteresting. Although I cannot speak for the series, the film was mostly dull and certainly wasn’t worth my time. I guess there’s a real group of people who feel different because there were two women in front of me, purchasing tickets, dressed up in costume from the era.

Most of the film revolves around how the Downton Abbey house staff dislikes being replaced by the royal team when the King and Queen of England (Simon Jones and Geraldine James respectively) come to spend a night at the house. For the staff, it is about personal pride in themselves and their abilities to serve the royals. Without much background I found this trite.

Then there is the discussion around who will get Downton Abbey. Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith) wants her grandchild to run the show after she’s gone. But unknown to her, her younger sister Maude (Imelda Staunton) had a child (Lucy Smith played by Tuppence Middleton) out of wedlock who is the rightful heir. That drama plays out in a couple of sarcastic and quippy conversations. My internal response to these scenes was that they were tired and “so what.”

The most exciting set of scenes were about how gay men had their own bawdy nightclub, and it was raided by the police. As being publicly gay in England was illegal at the time, it was interesting to see how the men handled it and how they were able to connect with each other given society’s norms.

Despite the grandeur of Downton Abbey in many of the long-range shots, I found the scenes and sets less engaging and somewhat drab. The whole story about a thieving seamstress had little value.

I don’t think any of the actors are worth a mention because the whole film felt flat, fell flat, and reaffirmed why I did not choose to watch the television series. Julian Fellowes wrote a tiresome screenplay that might interest a small segment of the population, but I couldn’t engage. I’m not sure even the fans of the television series would find this story of any interest. Michael Engler directed this tiresome story in a lackluster way.

Overall: Simply uninteresting.

Ad Astra

First Hit: Although Brad Pitt is excellent in this role, the expanse of the story, lack of substantive depth, and slow pacing left me unengaged.

The opening scene has Roy McBride (Pitt) is servicing an antenna that reaches from Earth deep into space. Then there’s a discussion about outposts on the moon and mars.  These two items alone tell the audience that we’re way into the future.

Roy’s job outside on the spacecraft type antennae tower gets interrupted by a power surge from space, they believe near the planet Neptune, causing part of the antenna to collapse, killing someone, and sending Roy falling from space back to Earth. Entering the more massive atmosphere his parachute finally opens. However, the chute gets punctured from pieces of the collapsing antenna and McBride cashes to the ground.

A theme throughout the film is McBride’s mental and physical state. His heart rate never goes above 80 bpm, even during the fall, and his responses to the questions about his psychological state are monitored by a machine. Approval by the machine voice is required for him to continue his missions. We see him sit down with the computer multiple times. Because he’s the only one we see take these tests, I wondered if others had to take these tests as well.

After the antennae accident which proves his mental, physical, and mettle to solve problems and that he has real guts, he’s called into a meeting with senior NASA and government officials.

In this meeting, we learn that the government believes that the Lima Project, which was headed to Neptune and led by Roy’s father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), may be causing the power surges and destroying Earth. They also believe that the senior McBride is still alive although, in Roy’s mind, his father is dead.

They want Roy to help them locate his father or the ship they were using so that they can send another ship, near Neptune, and destroy what is sending the power surges back towards Earth. In other words they want to use Roy as bait to coax his father out of hiding, if he’s alive. Once that is done, they don’t want Roy to actually go out and retrieve his father.

This is the premise of the story: Will Roy find his father alive? Is Clifford creating the power surges? Will Roy and his father make amends for all of the senior McBride’s absence in Roy’s life? Will the team be able to stop the power surges that are threatening Earth’s existence?

Roy wants to be an integral part of the final mission to Neptune, but he’s not given a chance. He’s only used to create messages that are sent to the Neptune area and see if his father respondes. After finding that his father is alive, because he cannot join the final mission to Neptune, he steals aboard the ship to Neptune and to confront his ever-absent father.

The film has multiple events and circumstances that do not make sense. One such set of facts is while on the moon and being transported from one base to a rocket launch base, Roy and Pruitt (Donald Sutherland) are attacked by pirates in other moon rovers. My question is where did these pirates come from? Where did they live? And, why was this scene needed? It seemed like they needed some action in the middle of the film so this is what the story used.

Pitt was great. There’s an integrated quality he brings to the character that made me believe, he loved what he did and was able to do it expertly and dispassionately. Ruth Negga (as Helen Lantos) was excellent as someone who supports Pitt on his journey. Sutherland as Thomas Pruitt, a friend of Clifford McBride and Roy’s guardian during part of the trip, was okay, but I’m not sure the role was needed. Jones was engaging and entertaining in this role as someone who only cared about his mission and learning if there is life beyond our solar system. James Gray and Ethan Gross wrote, and script that languished while hoping the philosophical concepts the story proposes will make the story engaging. Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely fill the bill. Gray also directed this film, and although it seems he borrowed heavily from some of the pictures presented in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it fell short of being as engaging.

Overall: This movie was entertaining enough to keep me present, but lacked enough depth to make me really want more.

Hustlers

First Hit: It started wonderfully, but as it wore on, it really felt a lot longer than its 1 hour 50 minute running time.

How the seedy world of strippers, lap dancing, and pole dancing is presented in the opening fifteen minutes was excellent. We arrive into the film on the back of the new Asian girl Dorothy, stage name Destiny (Constance Wu) trying to find her way into making enough money to help her grandmother (Wai Ching Ho) keep her home. The first set of scenes also include Dorothy sitting dressed up in a pristine office environment being interviewed by Elizabeth (Julia Stiles), a journalist. We now know that the club and stripper scenes are a flashback.

Back in the club, after watching Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), a veteran stripper and pole dancer, give a money showering performance at their club, Dorothy asks Ramona for some tips on how to be a better dancer and use her “money maker.”

Ramona, knows the ropes, was raised with a healthy streetwise attitude, and now lives a charming place and raising her daughter independently. Dorothy sees all this and would simply like to make enough money to support her grandmother and herself - independently.

They start working together and create a gang of four girls by adding Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) to maximize their money-making potential. As they all work men together in the lap dancing rooms, they start making some good money and begin to control the cut the club takes. Most all the men they work, are either independently wealthy or are in the finance trade as investment or stock brokers.

Disaster happens when the market busts in 2008 and the men, from whom they make their livelihood, lose their jobs or are squeezed too much to spend money on girls in a strip club.

The group falls apart, and now Dorothy is living with a boyfriend, and they have a child together. After she kicks her boyfriend out, she has to get a job. Not having appropriate experience, we see in a funny scene where she gets turned down for a cosmetic sales job and ends up back in the club to strip. But now, it’s filled with women who give blow jobs for $300 bucks and she just cannot stomach this kind of work.

Running into Ramona, they get the team back together and create a scheme to entice and fleece men of their money. To do this, they drug them with a mix of ketamine and MDMA to induce memory loss and causing judgment impairment. Once the girls slip this mixture into their target’s drinks, they charge a large transaction on their credit card, and split the money while the men have no idea how it happened.

The girls get greedy and start charging large amounts, $50K or more, on the men’s credit cards. Soon the men quit meeting up with them for dates. After a time, the deceit catches up with them, and in one scene, Dorothy gets a call from a client whose life is ruined because of her actions.

Dorothy is the conscience of the group and dislikes the recklessness of Ramona and some of the other girls she’s brought into the fold, so she turns witness against Ramona when they are all captured by the police.

The early scenes in the club and as Ramona and Dorothy’s friendship develops are touching and sweet. Where the film goes awry for me, was the ongoing scenes of fleecing the men. In my estimate a good half-hour could have been cut from the film and the story would have been crisp and engaging. I didn’t think Annabelle’s characteristic of throwing up at almost anything added to the film, and somehow I got the feeling this was a Will Ferrell (as producer) sort of flourish. The way this film unfolded, I kept wondering why I had to watch all this, to get to a conclusion.

Wu was excellent. I thought her portrayal of being unsure on the inside while giving the illusion of being strong and OK was well done. Lopez did a wonderful job of being the streetwise aging stripper that knew how to navigate the world of clubs and men to get what she wanted. Stiles was good as the interviewer. Palmer and Reinhart were very good as the two who rounded out this racially mixed foursome. However, as previously stated the Reinhart’s throwing up on a moments noticed, seem like it was an unneeded add-on to the character. Ho was wonderful as Dorothy’s grandmother and during the scene at Christmas, when they were telling stories, she stood out. Lorene Scafaria wrote and directed this film. I really think she wasn’t clear enough in the intent to tell a crisp good story. Some of the visual scenes, especially in the strip club, were really well shot and give the sense that you were there.

Overall: This could have been a much better film if it reflected the speed and intent of the first fifteen to twenty minutes.

The Goldfinch

First Hit: In general, I liked it despite the slow pacing and the occasional, awkward movement between time.

Occasionally while watching this film, I thought of how this might have been a problematic adaptation from the novel. Because of the strengths and weaknesses of each medium, I make it a point to not read many fiction books.

Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley as the younger and Ansel Elgort and the older Theo), was traumatized early in life because as he and his mother toured a New York City museum, a bomb went off, killing his mother.

The traumatization of this event is carried throughout the film by the actors and how they respond to what is going on around them. Both the young and adult Theos are almost zombie-like at times, looking blankly at the people talking to them and responding with little emotion. What Theo uses, as a child and adult, is The Goldfinch painting he had taken during the bombing. This painting was his mother’s favorite, and it is the one thing he has left to remind himself of her and their time together.

Theo’s father Larry (Owen Wilson) is not in the young boy’s life because he drank too much and was a mean alcoholic. Because his father is not around and he’s got nowhere to go, the State puts him in the home of the Barbour’s (Boyd Gaines and Nicole Kidman). Mr. Barbour is gregarious while Mrs. Barbour is thoughtful, quiet, pragmatic, and reserved. The audience is presented scenes where we see how she is slowly becoming very fond of Theo and his relationship with her young son Andy.

Of the Barbour’s children, Andy (Ryan Foust) and Kitsey (Carly Connors as the young Kitsey and Willa Fitzgerald as the older Kitsey) are open to having Theo as part of the family. The oldest boy, Platt (Jack DiFalco and Luke Kleintank), however is a bit of a brat in his early scenes but comes to show his heart later in the film.

When the bomb exploded, Theo was standing next to Pippa (Aimee Laurence and Ashleigh Cummings) and her uncle, her primary caretaker. Pippa’s uncle was killed just as Theo’s mother was, and this circumstance creates a connection that runs deep. It was Pippa’s uncle, just before he died, that told Theo to take the Goldfinch painting after the bombing. He also gave Theo a ring and told him to deliver it to Hobie. Pippa and her uncle lived with the uncle’s antique store business partner Hobie (Jeffrey Wright).  

Just as the Barbour’s were thinking of adopting Theo, Larry shows up and takes him to where he’s now living, Las Vegas. Taking him out of this safe environment and all the way to Las Vegas to live adds to Theo’s trauma. The scene when Xandra (Sarah Paulson), Larry’s partner, gives Theo a valium for this anxious plane ride to Vegas, tells a lot about the situation Theo is headed.

In Vegas, he meets another outcast student Boris (Finn Wolfhard and Aneurin Barnard). Boris is originally Ukrainian, is without a mother, and has lived all over the world because his father is a mining engineer who is also a mean drunk and gets booted out of all the jobs he takes on. They both live in a housing tract where 95% of all the houses are empty because of foreclosures, and the whole tract was built in a remote area. This is emblematic of their lives, loners together, and in the middle of nowhere.

After Larry tries and fails to get money out of Theo’s educational trust to pay off gambling debts, he gets drunk and dies in an auto accident. Quickly seeing that life with Xandra will be hell, he runs out of the house, gets on a bus,  and heads back to New York City and ends up living with Hobie.

At this point during the film, we’ve seen various clips of the bombing some of them through the dreams that Theo continues to have even through adulthood. This is where the film spends most of the time from here on out.

As an adult, Theo continues hold the wrapped-up painting as solace over the loss of his mother and often, he does this while being on drugs.

Yes, there are a lot of pieces in this story, but they all are important as the film winds into the last 40 minutes. Pippa, Hobie, Kitsey, Platt, Mrs. Barbour, and especially Boris all have significant moments as Theo finally comes to grips with his life and the actions he took as a young boy and later as a grown man.

Fegley was fantastic as young Theo. His ability to be both lost and present was excellent. Elgort was perfect as the continuation of Theo into adulthood. He was able to seamlessly give me the sense that he was the older version of the young Theo. Wolfhard and Barnard were outstanding as the young and old Boris, respectively. The loyalty he showed and willingness to fix the problem he caused Theo was perfectly portrayed. Kidman was excellent as Mrs. Barbour especially as the older Mrs. Barbour when her softness and love showed through so delicately. Wilson was true to his character and enjoyable as the man trying to make his way through gambling. Wright was sublime as Hobie the antique craftsman. When he turns to Theo, after Theo had taken busses all the way from Las Vegas to NYC with a dog, and says, you both can stay as long as you want, I was deeply touched. Laurence and Cummings were wonderful as Pippa young and old respectively. When she tells Theo that if one of them fell, the other would not be able to save either of them, it was heartbreakingly sincere. Foust was superb as Theo’s close friend and companion. Peter Straughan wrote a strong script from the novel by Donna Tartt. John Crowley did an excellent job of making this complex novel and story come alive on the screen. This was a complicated story to film, but, for me it was worth it.

Overall: Unless the audience member is ready to let this introspective story unfold within themselves, then they could become frustrated with this film.

Brittany Runs a Marathon

First Hit: Enjoyable at times, but I somehow think the story didn’t address the elephant in the room.

Brittany (Jillian Bell) is introduced to us as a woman who sleeps long hours, binge drinks, is overweight, and her life is slipping away from her. She resents a woman who lives above her in the building, calls her Martha when her name is Catherine (Michaela Watkins). The resentment comes because Brittany believes Catherine has money, is kind to her, is married, and runs every day.

Brittany has a social media hungry roommate named Gretchen (Alice Lee) who obviously uses her as a fat funny friend.

To show how low Brittany will go, she’s drinking in a bar, a guy tells her he’d like her to go with him to the restroom for some action, then pulls out paper cocktail napkins and says, “to protect your knees.” It is a humiliating scene and provides an emphasis on how her life is falling apart.

She goes to the doctor, who advises her that she needs to change her habits and life. One of the recommendations is to lose 45 – 55 pounds.

Up until this point, Brittany’s sarcastic, mean humor is tolerable by her friends and even her doctor, but later in the film, it changes.

Brittany goes to a gym, and when the gym representative tells her their least expensive program is $129.00 a month, she wisecracks herself out of joining the gym. Finally, she decides to try running like her neighbor Catherine does. To make extra money, Brittany decides to house and dog sit in wealthy homes.

When she goes into a home she’ll be sitting in, she discovers the night sitter, Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar) who thinks of himself as a functional art creator.

There are several scenes where we see Brittany struggling to make smart decisions about what she eats and not going out drinking because she’s making progress in her running resulting in the loss of some weight.

There are also scenes where Catherine and Brittany’s sister Shannon (Jennifer Dundas), Jern, and Gretchen are the brunt of some very vicious comments by Brittany. Even strangers, including one scene at Gretchen’s home, when Brittany drunk, slams an overweight guest.

This brings up the elephant in the room, often when Brittany gets vicious, she does it when she’s been drinking, and unfortunately, this film doesn’t address this. However, the film does discuss the importance of learning to like yourself, respecting your body, and a willingness to receive help, support and guidance from friends, people that are showing up to you.

The film does follow Brittany in her attempt to run a marathon, but for some reason, it came across a bit haphazard. It was inspirational to a point, but at times it seemed to miss essential aspects that could have raised this film to another level.

Bell is okay as Brittany, and I appreciated that she did lose and gain weight to deliver an authentic performance. Lee was instrumental as the social media affected roommate and friend. Watkins is lovely as the sober, and inspirational, neighbor and in the end, friend. Lil Rei Howery (as Demetrius) and Dundas as Brittany’s brother-in-law and sister were excellent. They showed a supportive understanding of Brittany’s behavior. Ambudkar was funny and enjoyable to watch as Brittany’s the co-house sitter. Paul Downs Colaizzo wrote this screenplay based on his former roommate, the real, Brittany O’Neill’s adventure to start running and run a New York City Marathon. Colaizzo also directed this film, and he knew what he wanted, but I’m not sure it was enough.

Overall: This film seemed to float between wanting to be a comedy, through sarcasm, and a drama with powerful messages to share.