Greenberg (2010)

Ebert liked it (This is an intriguing film, shifting directions, considering Greenberg's impossibility in one light and then another. If he's stuck like this at 40, is he stuck for good? What Ben Stiller does with the role is fascinating. We can't stand Greenberg. But we begin to care about him. Without ever overtly evoking sympathy, Stiller inspires identification. You don't have to like the hero of a movie. But you have to understand him — better than he does himself, in some cases). I'm not so sure.

A. O. Scott liked it, too. I am not so sure.

Definitely, maybe (2008)

An old favorite that holds up nicely.

Great opening sequence. Kevin Kline shines in a small role ("be a man; drink." "Are you comfortable?" a nurse asks him as he lies in a hospital bed after a heart attack. "I make a living," he answers, continuing, "give us a smile, sweetheart, I've been waiting all my ife to use that line."). And Maya ("What's the boy word for 'slut'?"). The five main characters are good. Quite enjoyable. Still.

Your Sister's Sister (2011)

A.O. Scott in the Times pretty well gets to the crux of it, in his Movie Review: Solitary Retreat to a Remote Island Leads to Many Mix-Ups: Lynn Shelton’s ‘Your Sister’s Sister’. I liked it. Far more cursing than I thought necesary to capture the conversational style of the characters.

Roger Ebert liked it, writing about Mark Duplass, who plays Jack:  He's tall, comfortably built, shaggy, genial. He wears his testosterone lightly. He helps this film succeed because he doesn't push too hard in a tense situation.

I had this entry in my calendar on 12 November 2012: reviewed by Joe Morgernsten in WSJ.com on 6/15/12 - Lynn Shelton's lovely tale of swirling feelings was shot in a mere 12 days, on a budget that must have been minuscule. A couple of minutes after it's started, though, you know you're in the presence of people who will surprise and delight you.

Crazy, stupid, love

A fun film. Originally skeptical that I would be watching another sappy love story (and ready to leave after short interval), I was utterly surprised by the film, and how much I liked it.

Steven Carrel (unpleasant memories of watching a very small bit on an "Office" episode did not come back to me at first, for I was not quite sure it was him playing Cal) plays a husband who is blindsided by his wife while they are pondering what dessert to order; rather than agreeing to split a sweet she says I want a divorce. She (played nicely by Julianne Moore) has decided that, after 25 years of marriage, and hitting her forties, she needs something different. She also announced she has "slept with David Lindhagen" (played with some understatement by Kevin Bacon; that name becomes something of a tagline).

Ryan Gosling plays Jacob, a womanizer who, sick of hearing Cal complain about being cuckolded by David Lindhagen, decides to remake Cal into the man who he might never have been, but should be. Gosling holds back from doing a parody of the Casanova who scores with ease (an interesting aspect of his conquests is that he catches not just white women, but also black women; of course, this being a movie, almost of all of them have gorgeous bodies and are attractive).

Emma Stone plays a woman who is about to become a lawyer, and whom Jacob hits on early on in the film. She rebuffs his advance, and goes back to hoping that the lawyer she's dating will propose marriage to her. Her friend, Liz, tells her to stop playing it safe, to stop going for PG-13, and to loosen up and live.

There are various other characters that work: Cal's 13 year old son, in love with a 17 year old babysitter, who in turn is in love with Cal. And there are twists: the first woman whom Cal hits on and scores with (played with aplomb and plenty of cleavage by Maria Tomei), turns out to be his son's teacher.

The films works, is fun, and I enjoyed it quite very much.

Gideon's daughter

Reading a review of a new film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I chose this film as another Bill Nighy work. Terrific choice. His character, Gideon Warner, is a fixer, a PR man, the one to go to for advice, a power broker. At that he's good. As a father, he is not. He is losing his daughter, who is about to graduate and go to Colombia to do good. Nighy has an understated, less-is-more acting style, and he does wonderful work with this character. The excesses are left to others. As he bumbles along, Gideon meets a couple who wants someone in government to listen to their story of how their child was killed. No one does. Gideon arranges it. Both Gideon and Stella drift toward one another in an adult love story that leaves one wanting more.

Mother and Child

How three women are affected by adoption. 51 year old Karen (Benning) has never stopped thinking about the child she gave up for adoption, 37 years earlier, when she was 14 years old. That child (Watts), now a successful attorney, lives an empty life, centered around achievement in law, careless sex based on conquest, extreme cynicism about life and people. A black woman (Washington), unable to conceive her own child, desperately hopes that adopting will fill the void in her soul.

Benning allows herself to be seen by the camera as she is, a 53 year old woman who is not trying to hide her age. She need not hide anything; no one should. She is stellar as a woman haunted by her past, caring for her aging mother, unable to connect with people. Into her life enters a fellow physical therapist (Smits), whom she pushes away, afraid of connecting, of feeling emotion. He persists, and they become friends, and, eventually, marry. That marriage is a little forced, and a weak spot of the film. One of few.

Watts is an unsympathetic character, despite what might be a most sympathetic circumstance: she misses not having a mother, not knowing whom her birth mother was, and that haunts her. Yet she turns that hurt and anger into a manipulative cynicism of undue proportions. During a sexual encounter with her new boss (Jackson), she not only controls the entire act, but calls him old man, deliberately wanting to put him in his place (she is already on top, literally).

You may not quite trust “Mother and Child”— its soft spots and fuzzy edges give it away — but you can believe just about everyone in it. A.O. Scott's NYT review.

Washington's character, Lucy, is a layered woman who desperately wants to be a mother. When she and her husband interview with a nun who will arrange the adoption, and then with the mother who is going to give up her baby, Lucy talks incessantly, then upbraids her husband for not stopping her. When the birth mother decides not to give up her baby, Washington launches into a tour de force, an amazingly emotional and hysterical outburst of anger and pain. It is acting at its best.

In the end, all three stories meld into one. Elizabeth, pregnant, abandons her law firm, goes to work with a public interest firm, and insists on giving birth naturally despite a dangerous condition. She sees her brown baby (her boss was indeed the father; she got pregnant despite having tied her tubes at 17 {this scene is weak, and a missed opportunity, though perhaps Elizabeth would not have reflected on it} and decided to have the child), but dies. That baby is given to Lucy, and Lucy agrees to let Karen visit.

Love me or leave me

Cast: Doris Day, James Cagney, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully
Director: Charles Vidor
Writer: Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart
Running Time: 122 min.
Genre: Drama, Musical
Rating: No Rating
Synopsis: One of the gutsiest movie musicals of the 1950s, Love Me or Leave Me is the true story of 1930s torch-singer Ruth Etting, here played by Doris Day. While working in a dime-a-dance joint, Ruth is discovered by Chicago racketeer Martin The Gimp Snyder (fascinatingly played with nary a redeeming quality by James Cagney). The smitten Snyder exerts pressure on his show-biz connections, and before long Ruth is a star of nightclubs, stage and films. Ruth continues to string Snyder along to get ahead, but she can't help falling in love with musician Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). After sinking his fortune into a nightclub for Ruth's benefit, Snyder is rather understandably put out when he finds her in the arms of Alderman. Snyder shoots the musician (but not fatally) and is carted away to prison. Upon his release, Snyder finds that Ruth is still in love with Alderman; he is mollified by her act of largesse in keeping her promise to perform in his nightclub at a fraction of her normal salary. No one comes off particularly nobly in Love Me or Leave Me, even though the still-living Ruth Etting, Martin Snyder and Johnny Alderman were offered full script approval. The fact that we are seeing flesh-and-blood opportunists rather than the usual sugary-sweet MGM musical stick figures naturally makes for a more powerful film. In his autobiography, James Cagney had nothing but praise for his co-star Doris Day, and bemoaned the fact that she would soon turn her back on dramatic roles to star in a series of fluffy domestic comedies.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

I enjoyed it. This review captures the film quite well. Doris Day pulled off the songs; her voice had a little, even more than little, resonance and vibrato to it (a couple of times I thought of Sara Vaughn), not the usual limited range and sweetness of so many other musicals.

Grace is gone

Good story of a father of two daughters who can not find a way to tell them their mother, s soldier, was killed in action in Iraq. Cusack is good. Shélan O'Keefe, whoc plays the older daughter, is a gem.