Change Your Image
Lazyl
Reviews
Happiest Season (2020)
The usual tropes (SPOILER ALERT)
Good performances, but a script filled with tired tropes about dysfunctional family holidays which miraculously resolve in the last 5 minutes. Ambitious (at family's expense) father, aggressive you-will-be-nice mother, family members lying to each other all over the place, and no real good reason for the main character to actually be in love with her lying partner.
The only refreshing parts are the ones exploring the incredibly painful results when a family rejects a gay child. That needs to be explored more everywhere, and while I know not all families reject their gay children, this family seems well-placed to do so except for the last-minute turnaround into mental health for everyone. The only reason this is two stars instead of one is that the attempt to explore this aspect was ok.
My biggest beef: Why on earth does Abby love her partner? Liars rarely confine themselves to one area of their lives, and we never see what makes the relationship important to either of them. We're supposed to simply accept it as a given and be surprised when lies and dysfunction abound.
And, MY biggest beef: no real character development. Just character about-face at the last minute. Someone needs to inform the writers that development is a process, not an event.
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
19th Century Tired Pre-Feminist story of Man=Happiness
Full disclosure: I am a recently (ecstatically) divorced woman living my life happily as a whole person without (gasp!) a man. Also a successful and hard-working writer.
Diane Lane does as well as she can, but this "a woman's happiness is with a man" shtick is tired. A divorced American writer who lost her San Francisco house to her ex and his lover travels to Italy and suddenly has the wherewithal to buy a run-down Italian money-pit villa where men emerge everywhere to make her feel better? Without having to resort to (gasp!) actual writing work? What happened to truly finding your self and caring for that person, regardless of who is around to fluff up your ego? A friend recommended this because I love Italy (the real one, not this 50s fantasy) and was recently divorced. Give me "Enchanted April" instead where women discover they are complete just as they are, without any hangers on or people to tell them how great/beautiful/amazing they are. Not against men, just against anyone defining themselves solely by a relationship. What ever happened to loving human partnerships where both are able to fulfill themselves in the context of the relationship? Sorry I wasted the hour and a half. Better off petting the cat and enjoying just being alive.
Carol (2015)
Beautiful But Too Subtle--And Not Positive At That
Visually, production-wise, musically: a wonderful and enigmatic view of early 1950s America. I loved the clothes, the light, the reflections, the cars.
Emotionally, unfortunately I didn't care much one way or the other about the characters' needs, loves, wants, or desires. This in spite of beautiful performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
**Spoilers below**:
About half-way through the film, I thought Carol was simply a rich woman who used everyone around her: her former lover, her estranged husband, her new girl-toy, even her child, to attempt to make herself feel something. When the film didn't go that way, I was surprised. I suppose it could be seen as that anyway: At the end, is Carol's expression one of love or one of the conquering vamp? Who knows? I didn't really care.
As for Therese, I wish she would say "yes" to something more interesting. As a matter of fact she did say "no" during her life: to a young man who she led along far too long before she escaped a dreary and predictable if safe relationship.
On the whole, this film does not put women in a very positive light. The characters seem lost, in all aspects of their lives, and they seek to posit something real in their experiences through a love affair that, in the end, seems mostly about selfish people getting what they think will make them happy--even in the face of evidence that it will not.
Disappointed. I looked forward to this film very much. Someday, perhaps, we will have a non-cisgender love story that actually has some joy in it. And ends not with a scene completely open to interpretation, but one of the wholeness and satisfaction of shared love.
Cutter's Way (1981)
You've Got To Be Kidding
Did the other reviewers see the same movie? We watched this, remembering it's reputation from the 80s as a good movie. Instead, we got bad American fake noir with a meandering script, one-dimensional characters, and poor Jeff Bridges wandering around looking for a decent scene where he can keep his shirt on.
We stopped caring about halfway through, but decided to wait for the prescribed "cat and mouse" game of the CD jacket. Sorry, missed the mouse as well as the cat -- just a couple of weasels running around trying to find justice instead of taking whatever evidence they had to the D.A. like big boys.
CW has not aged well -- drunken wife-beaters with drunken wives are no longer considered pathos, just pathetic. Hangers-on who can't make a decision and sleep with their best friend's wives: dopes. Rich guys who are "responsible" for the ills of the world? Sorry -- watch "Chinatown."
Best part was recognizing Will Roger's Sunset Boulevard ranch and stable in the final scenes and during the polo match. Otherwise, a waste of time.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Am I the only one who hated this movie?
Love Ridley, loved Gladiator, but this movie is a dog! As far as I can tell, except for Liam Neeson and Ghassan Massoud, it's a bunch of stiffs and slow-mo gore.
Not only is it entirely historically INaccurate, it is equally culturally so: no Middle Eastern princess I know of rode around in sexy gold jewelry talking to strangers and revealing her face. And excuse me: how is it that people who have lived in the desert successfully for centuries need a dirty European blacksmith to teach them how to build a well and irrigate their land? That was a concoction to make a hero out of Bloom's otherwise wooden character.
In terms of even a nod to accuracy: Most of the Muslims' horses weren't Arabians or Barbs, the type they would have had in those eras. (Arabian bloodlines are documented to 3,000 years ago, folks.) Ridley should have reviewed "Lawrence of Arabia" before he made this movie, which had Real Bedouins and Their Arabs! Plus Ridley committed my worst movie sin: Fake Horsey Noises. Sorry, folks, horses only nicker, scream, or neigh under these circumstances: when they're hungry or lonely, when they're dying in great pain, or when they are having sex. It just doesn't happen when they turn left fast because the actor/stuntman doesn't know how to handle the reins.
The final blow: here's Bloom running through the movie being true to knighthood (honor, protect the weak, etc.) telling a PRINCESS to just "stop being a princess." Royalty in the Middle Ages had responsibilities, too, you know: it was the royals' castles that provided protection from attack for the locals. "Just stop" and you leave them to the next warlord's mercy. Or could that be just another sexist view that the woman's "place" is with her man -- not with the power? Naw. Not possible in the 21th Century. Surely.
My advice to friends: wait for the video -- then don't rent it.