The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Kathryn Hahn. Show all posts

Sunday, 2 April 2023

Movie Review: Private Life (2018)

Genre: Dramedy

Director: Tamara Jenkins

Starring: Paul Giamatti, Kathryn Hahn, Kayli Carter, Molly Shannon

Running Time: 123 minutes

Synopsis: In New York City, literary couple Richard and Rachel (Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn) are in their forties and desperate to have a child. They continue to pursue invitro fertilization while awaiting the outcome of an adoption application. Richard's step-niece Sadie (Kayli Carter), a floundering college student, is an intriguing possibility as an egg donor, although her mother Cynthia (Molly Shannon) is shocked by the idea.

What Works Well: Writer and director Tamara Jenkins conceives a bitingly funny exploration of an achingly serious topic. Richard and Rachel's all-consuming desperation to pursue parenthood is treated with genuine respect and the all-too-human humour of a stressed couple. The best of intentions result in unintended consequences, exposing mismatched expectations, self-doubt, difficult conversations, emotional pitfalls, vulnerabilities, false hopes, generational divides, and inter-family conflicts. Jenkins infuses the story with an organic New York setting, while touching performances from Giamatti, Hahn, and Carter bring to life three fully rounded characters.

What Does Not Work As Well: Just a few of the dialogue exchanges are over-burdened with scholarly references.

Conclusion: The often vexatious topic of procreation receives charmingly roguish treatment.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Friday, 2 April 2021

Movie Review: We're The Millers (2013)

A raunchy comedy, We're The Millers finds good laughs in a story of strangers coming together as a family for all the wrong reasons.

In Denver, Dave Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is the friendly neighbourhood marijuana dealer. After tangling with local thugs, his cache of weed and money is stolen leaving him in debt to snarky supplier Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms). As payback, Brad pressures Dave into accepting a drug smuggling assignment to transport marijuana from Mexico into the United States.

To deflect suspicions Dave fabricates a family and recruits stripper Rose (Jennifer Aniston), awkward neighbour Kenny (Will Poulter), and street kid Casey (Emma Roberts) as his wife, son and daughter respectively. They head to Mexico in an RV and en route meet RV vacationers Don and Edie Fitzgerald (Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn) and their daughter Melissa (Molly Quinn). Not unexpectedly, Dave does not have much of a plan, and nothing on the trip will go according to any plan.

Adopting a freewheeling style with plenty of improvisation, We're The Millers hits the mark at least as often as it misses. In many ways a foul-mouthed and twisted companion piece to Robin Williams' RV (2006), here director Rawson Marshall Thurber uses the drug smuggling plot as a jumping off point to shove a group of lonely and caustic people into a confined space and then hurl them into a wild adventure.

Dave, Rose, Kenny and Casey are used to being alone, and pretending to be a family is an immediate uphill battle. Having to do so while fooling drug barons in Mexico and suspicious guards at the border only adds to the fun. Of course they will eventually grow as people and come together as a family, but not before some quite hilarious moments, most designed to blow past any limits of decency.

The gangly Kenny is often in the middle of the best moments, proving himself an unlikely rapper before receiving potentially scandalous kissing lessons. The interactions with the Fitzgerald family just get better and weirder, with Dave and Rose stumbling into much more than they bargained during an in-the-tent highlight. And Jennifer Aniston lets loose and has fun with a stripping routine to distract a couple of real and ruthless drug smugglers doggedly pursuing Dave's unexpectedly large haul.

As can be expected some sequences fall flat, and the late introduction of amusement park ride attendant Scottie P adds an unnecessary new character and prolongs the length to a generous 110 minutes. Despite the mishaps, We're The Millers does not pretend to be anything other than what it is, a romp across the border looking for as much ear-poking trouble as possible.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Saturday, 3 August 2019

Movie Review: Captain Fantastic (2016)

A drama about alternative fatherhood, Captain Fantastic enjoys moments of familial grit and humour, but backs away from challenging discourse.

Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) is the middle-aged father of six children, living off the grid in a forest, home schooling the kids while teaching them wilderness survival skills and espousing a left-wing, anti-establishment life philosophy. The gangly and socially awkward eldest son Bodevan (George MacKay) is accepted to top colleges but hesitant to broach the topic with his dad.

Ben's wife Leslie is bipolar and commits suicide in the hospital. Another son, Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) blames his father for her death and is least convinced by his parents' lifestyle choice. Leslie's parents (Frank Langella and Ann Dowd) do not want Ben at the funeral, but he decides to crash the event anyway, setting out on an epic road trip with the kids on the family bus.

Carrying an echo from 1986's Mosquito Coast, Captain Fantastic explores the value of disassociating with what society has to offer and reverting back to an organic, waste-free, close-to-nature upbringing. Director and writer Matt Ross explores the fragility of fatherhood and creates an intriguing dynamic featuring a mostly close-knit family, a sensitive and ironically modern approach to parenting in rough surroundings, and children arriving at crossroads and forced to start making independent choices.

For the most part, Ross plays fair. This is neither a celebration nor condemnation of Ben's approach to life. In so much as his kids are better educated, physically fit and able to live off the land, they are also social misfits and deprived of interaction with friends. The eldest Bo is tongue-tied in front of girls, and in a funny sequence, disintegrates when an attractive girl flirts with him at an RV park during the road trip.

Along the way to the funeral Ross draws stark contrasts with a more traditional family as Ben makes a stop at the house of his sister Harper (Kathryn Hahn), her husband Dave (Steve Zahn) and their two kids. The two families may as well be from different planets, as neither the adults nor the children are able to communicate and function as an extended family.

The clash of cultures reaches a zenith with the deceased Leslie's parents, her wealthy father Jack in particular representing everything Ben stands against. The grieving father now wants his revenge by banishing the widowed husband, but Ben's peacefully rebellious psyche means he will not back down easily.

For all the good work created in establishing the premise, Captain Fantastic takes the wrong turn in its final act. Just when Ross appears to have built a sturdy foundation for a soul-searching conclusion, he takes the easy way out, completely jettisons two characters, and goes looking for a pat feel-good finale that avoids all difficult conversations.

Viggo Mortensen holds the film together in an understate performance, conveying the quiet anguish of loss and the creeping self-doubt as seemingly for the first time, Ben starts to witness the potential negative ramifications of his core beliefs. As he walks a fine line between hero and villain to his kids, Captain Fantastic is different in his approach but grappling with conflicts familiar to most dads.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Sunday, 13 August 2017

Movie Review: How Do You Know (2010)

An insipid romance, How Do You Know is a torturous two hours of nothingness.

At 31 years old Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon) is cut from the US national baseball team. She starts dating two men: professional baseball star Matty Reynolds (Owen Wilson) and businessman George Madison (Paul Rudd). Matty is rich, handsome and superficial, but starts to genuinely care about Lisa. George is head of a large corporation, but he is facing a serious fraud investigation related to falsifying tax records. George's pregnant personal assistant Annie (Kathryn Hahn) is loyal, but his domineering father Charles (Jack Nicholson) appears to be behind all that is bad in George's life.

Lisa moves into Matty's swanky apartment, but he misbehaves just enough to push here away and into the waiting arms of George. Meanwhile, Charles is trying to find a way to stay out of trouble with regulators by pushing George deeper into the hole.

Written, directed and co-produced by James L. Brooks, How Do You Know may be the moment a once great filmmaker finally hit the wall with a dull thud. From the uninspired title to the stultifying pacing and abject lack of content, How Do You Know is devoid of laughs, drama or genuine emotion of any kind. The film rolls over and dies early, with neither Brooks nor the cast able to generate even the faintest of pulses.

The one interesting element in the plot would have been Lisa dealing with the rejection of being summarily cut from the sport she loved. Witherspoon tries hard in a couple of scenes to convey the trauma of dealing with the emptiness that resides on the other side of the dream, but Brooks soon loses interest and resumes the ping pong between Matty and George. Witherspoon is reduced to hauling her luggage back and forth between the two men, by buses and taxis, in an unbelievable display of bankrupt writing.

Meanwhile the two men stay at the most superficial level, Matty the playboy athlete and George the honest businessman. Neither progress an inch from their starting positions, and two hours into the movie Matty is still being a dork and George is still all innocent puppy admiration. In a desperate attempt to stretch the proceedings to two hours, Brooks introduces several scenes in which the characters agree to not talk, and then proceed to not communicate, thereby setting up more excruciating scenes to cover the same ground.

How Do You Know is sad late career misfire for Brooks as director and Nicholson as a film star, and they both took a long, possibly permanent hiatus after this debacle.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Thursday, 6 July 2017

Movie Review: She's Funny That Way (2014)

An old fashioned screwball comedy, She's Funny That Way registers some laughs in an unlikely coincidence-filled setting with plenty of references to other classic movies.

Rising movie star Isabella "Izzy" Patterson (Imogen Poots) is recounting the story of her acting breakthrough to an interviewer. While working as call girl "Glo Stick" she spends one night with theatre director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson), who unexpectedly gifts her $30,000 to quit prostitution and chase her acting dream. Izzy heeds his advice and shows up to a Broadway audition, unaware that Albertson is the director and the show stars his wife Delta (Kathryn Hahn) and British actor Seth Gilbert (Rhys Ifans). To make matters worse, Seth had spotted Izzy and Arnold on their night together. The playwright Joshua Fleet (Will Forte) immediately takes a liking to Isabella.

Meanwhile, Isabelle is seeing neurotic therapist Jane Claremont (Jennifer Aniston), who is also Joshua's girlfriend. Jane's other clients include Judge Pendergast (Austin Pendleton) who is obsessed with Izzy, and who has hired private detective Harold Fleet (George Morfogen), Joshua's father, to track Izzy's every move. Delta starts to suspect that Arnold has had a series of affairs with call girls, handing out $30,000 to each. The characters bump into each other in a series of compromising situations, resulting in Isabella launching her acting career while Arnold has a lot of explaining to do.

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich who also co-wrote the film with his ex-wife Louise Stratten, She's Funny That Way deploys the tried and tested formula of multiple threads connecting all the characters and wild coincidences resulting in compromising encounters at the worst possible time. As comedies go this is old territory, and She's Funny That Way has a strong whiff of good but recycled Woody Allen without the angst, with salutes to Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards. Bogdanovich provides enough of a polish to make his film interesting, and utilizes the cast to good effect.

Jennifer Aniston as a narcissistic therapist registers the most laughs, while Wilson, Poots (who overdoes her Brooklyn accent) and Hahn carry the acting load. Pendergast and Fleet as the lecherous judge and his gumshoe add to the enjoyable sense of farce, while Ifans infuses dry humour from the sidelines.

The American Dream theme is handled with appropriate cynicism, Izzy's fantastical rapid rise from call girl to respected stage and screen actress presented without irony. Elsewhere Bogdanovich creates a society where marriage and relationships don't mean much to the men: Arnold and Joshua betray their partners without hesitation, while Seth pursues Delta with nauseating smarm.

For fans of film history there are references to Lana Turner, Rio Bravo, True Romance, and the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch movie Cluny Brown. Cybill Shepherd (as Izzy's mom) and a Tatum O'Neal cameo provide a nod to Bogdanovich's stellar past,

The first coincidental gathering of all the characters at a restaurant is on-target, but the story is pushed beyond its limits in the final third, as yet another round of chance encounters this time on the same hotel floor kicks off, an example of the same joke told too often. But overall She's Funny That Way provides enough sharp dialogue, adult situations and respectful winks at the past to comfortably ride out the rough patches.