Movie Review: Ladies In Black (2018)

Genre: Dramedy  

Director: Bruce Beresford  

Starring: Julia Ormond, Angourie Rice, Rachael Taylor, Alison McGirr  

Running Time: 109 minutes  

Synopsis: Sydney, Australia, 1959. The sparkling Goode's department store is ready for the Christmas shopping rush. Having just finished her schooling, 16 year-old Lisa (Angourie Rice) joins the team of sales ladies in the women's fashion department as a temporary apprentice. She meets saleswomen Patty (Alison McGirr), who is having marriage problems; Fay (Rachael Taylor) who is disillusioned with Australian men; and Magda (Julia Ormond), an immigrant from Europe who runs the luxury dress department. As the summer progresses, Lisa is influenced by her new surroundings and starts her transition to adulthood.

What Works Well: The adaptation of Madeleine St. John's book is a charming coming-of-age story, free of villains, full of good intentions and humorous commentary, and enriched with societal shifts occurring within a time-and-place context. Lisa is looking to the future just as young women's opportunities are expanding, but she has to navigate her parents' entrenched attitudes. The locals treat immigrants like Magda as exotic outsiders, but the newcomers are anyway eager to nudge their way towards integration and participate in nation building, as Fay finds out when her search for a man takes an unexpected turn. Director Bruce Beresford demonstrates genuine care for each of his characters, and starting from Lisa dropping into the Goode's puddle, expands the storytelling rings with practiced grace.

What Does Not Work As Well: Sweetness and light dominate, sometimes to excess. 

Conclusion: The outfit may be black, but the attitude is optimistically bright.

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Movie Review: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008)

A grand fantasy romance, The Curious Of Benjamin Button has a quirky premise but delivers an eloquent love story featuring a man living life in reverse.

It's 2005 in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina is quickly bearing down on the city. The elderly Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett) is on her hospital deathbed, and insists that her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) read to her from the diary of a certain Benjamin Button. Most of the story is then told in flashback.

In 1918, Benjamin is born with the wrinkles, cataracts, arthritis and failing body of an old man. His mother dies during childbirth and his father Thomas (Jason Flemyng) abandons Benjamin to the care of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who works at a home for the elderly. As Benjamin grows older in age, his body gets younger in health. His hair starts to grow back, his eyesight improves, and a visit to a faith healer gets him out of his wheelchair and on the way to walking. In 1930 Benjamin first meets seven-year-old Daisy (Elle Fanning) and they become friends.  Around 1935 he leaves the nursing home and accepts his first job, working on the tugboat of the salty Captain Mike Clark (Jared Harris). Daisy pursues her fortune as a ballet dancer in New York City.

In 1941 Clark's boat is stationed in the port city of Murmansk, Russia, where Benjamin experiences his first true love and has a passionate affair with Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), the bored wife of a British diplomat. The US joins World War Two and Benjamin has a harrowing encounter with the enemy on the high seas. After the war Benjamin tries to reconnect with Daisy (Blanchett), but their lives are on different trajectories. Meanwhile, his father Thomas reappears with surprising news about an industrial legacy awaiting Benjamin.

Directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is a loose adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. Roth sprinkles the script with plenty of similarities to his own average man lives an extraordinary life as portrayed in Forrest Gump, and monumental but impossible romance through a diary lens popularized by The English Patient. Benjamin Button both suffers from comparisons to the two classics and benefits from the whimsical stars of destiny are aligning ethos. Meanwhile, Fincher makes sure that no matter what is happening on the screen over close to three hours, the film looks spectacular: Benjamin Button is frequently a sumptuous visual feast.

The film's weakness resides in the relative dormancy of its central character. Intriguing as his story is, Benjamin Button does not actually do much in his own life. He is swept along by the tide of history, navigating from 1918 to about 1990 in reverse health progression, things happening to him and all around him, but he himself instigating little. Daisy and Elizabeth steer the two big romances in his life, while his mother Queenie, the captain Mike Clark and Benjamin's father Thomas influence most of his life's directions. It is only late on that Benjamin independently insists on one key decision, but it's a relatively small contribution to a drama where he is most often a passenger and observer.

The film's first half nestles the more magical spirit and is more powerful, Benjamin's childhood years in the more innocent pre-war era resonating through a New Orleans open to strange events. That no one pursues answers to Benjamin's curious medical condition both raises the eyebrow and helps add fairy tale gold dust to the story. The second half is still interesting but less compelling. Benjamin and Daisy have to wait for a sweet spot of harmony as he grows younger and she matures, and there are typical emotional trials and tribulations as they find and then struggle to retain their couplehood.

The subtle and progressive makeup effects are a marvel, with Brad Pitt thriving as he convincingly portrays a physically frail teenager growing into an immature 70 year old in a young man's body. Cate Blanchett is less effective, particularly as the bed-ridden near-death Daisy, her mumbled and drugged lines of dialogue extremely difficult to discern.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button reaches most of the sentimental high notes that it strives for, and contains enough of its own peculiarities to overcome the more derivative fundamentals.

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Movie Review: My Week With Marilyn (2011)

Another sacrifice at the altar of Marilyn Monroe obsession, My Week With Marilyn offers a captivating Michelle Williams performance, but not much else of interest.

It's 1957, and Marilyn Monroe (Williams), the biggest movie star in the world, arrives in London to film what would become The Prince And The Showgirl, a lightweight comedy with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench). Amidst the predictable media storm, young Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) lands a job as Third Assistant Director on the production, essentially an errand boy to satisfy Olivier's whims. Clark is eager and enthusiastic, and starts a tentative relationship with wardrobe assistant Lucy (Emma Watson). Meanwhile, his position on the set provides him with a front row seat as the production stutters to a start.

Monroe is with her newly minted third husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), but their relationship appears cold. She is much more dependent on her acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker), whose role is to protect Monroe's fragile self esteem. Olivier's wife Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond) is gracious enough but keeps a wary eye on her husband. With filming in turmoil and Monroe's frequent late arrivals to the set infuriating Olivier, Miller abruptly abandons his new wife and heads back to the US. Monroe turns to Clark for comfort, the superstar and the third assistant director raising eyebrows as they start to spend time together, despite the objections of Monroe's business partner Milton H. Greene (Dominic Cooper).

My Week With Marilyn is based on two (!) books by Colin Clark chronicling his limited interaction with Monroe, and the movie cannot shake the nagging sentiment that this is one temporarily starstruck man milking a short experience for all its worth. And while there may be an interesting story here about the ease with which hypercharisma can distort reality, director Simon Curtis does not help by portraying the time that Marilyn and Clark spent together as an almost mystical ideal romance.

This may have been how a mesmerised Clark remembered events; it simply comes across as one man emotionally drowning within the allure of an incredibly beautiful but deeply troubled woman, and mistaking her ability to influence all men for something resembling a whirlwind relationship. More pointedly exploring the difference between what Clark felt and what actually happened would have made for a much more interesting movie.

Instead we get a princess and the pauper fairy tale, complete with the prolonged montage sequence of the couple touring Windsor Castle and Eton College, and then skinny dipping. At best Monroe was furious that her husband abandoned her, desperate for company, irrational due to constant pill popping, and found the most naive sap to baby sit her ego. But the Adrian Hodges script treats the week as a magical coming together of two souls, and the saccharine taste just doesn't convince.

Stretching the shallow events of one week to a respectable movie length means that every detail is prolonged past its reasonable level of importance. Ironically, the scenes revealing the struggles of filming a movie with an erratic Marilyn are more interesting, Curtis capturing the continuous tension created by an unstable star, frequently late to the set and trying to pretend that the role requires great insight and preparation, while in fact she sleeps off her latest fistful of pills.

My Week With Marilyn does offer an affecting Michelle Williams turn as Monroe, or at least she nails the mannerisms of Monroe's public persona. Williams immediately erases the line between actress and subject, and dances along all the octaves of a highly strung, enormously talented, and incredibly famous woman, struggling with self confidence at one end of the scale and effortlessly deploying her irresistible sex-drenched charms at the other.

Branagh is less successful as Olivier, never appearing at ease in the role and unable to shed the act and find the actor. Judi Dench brings plenty of class as Sybil Thorndike, but she effectively disappears halfway through the film. Redmayne is firmly stuck in family theatre territory, where the fact that he is acting - almost always with a smile! - overshadows everything else that he is trying to convey.

Williams alone makes the film worth watching, and her performance raises the production from cheap television movie to a tolerable film experience. Never mind My Week With Marilyn; the 100 minutes with Michelle are what matter.

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Movie Review: First Knight (1995)

Yest another interpretation of the King Arthur legend, First Knight is Arthur-light.

Featuring a mildly nauseating relationship between Sean Connery's King Arthur and Julia Ormond's Guinevere, Arthur is a full 35 years older than his great love, and to no surprise, there is no passion but lots of ick between Connery and Ormond. This Guinevere is much more interested in Lancelot, played by a long-haired Richard Gere as a dashing, carefree, personal-freedom loving expert swordsman. Director Richard Zucker works hard to generate some sparks between Ormond and Gere, and ultimately some passion emerges, but it's all at the level of superficial infatuation driven by Hollywood heroics.

Christopher Cross as the evil Prince Malagant pops up at appropriate moments to snarl his way through the movie as the designated bad guy, dressed all in black to make the point, and while he thinks he's after control of Camelot, what he is really doing is placing Guinevere in a succession of damsel-in-distress situations from which Lancelot can heroically rescue her to move their love story along.

Prince Malagant has split from King Arthur and is seeking to establish his own dominion by all means necessary. While the wise old Arthur is all about shared democracy and doing good for the people, the young and aggressive Malagant is only about hard-nosed leadership delivered by the sword, aimed initially at the heart of Leonesse, the territory ruled by Guinevere. Lancelot cares only for his personal freedom and not much else, but finds himself helping Arthur and lusting after Guinevere. And yes, it all sounds remarkably like Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Princess Leia and Han Solo transplanted to medieval England.

Gere makes no attempt at a British accent, but he and Connery are never less than watchable, and their presence gives William Nicholson's average script enough weight to be tolerable. Without the megawatt stars, First Knight would have been conclusively third rate.

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