B- | A hippie shares a meal with her rich opposites. Directed by Miguel Arteta Starring Salma Hayek, John Lithgow, and Connie Britton Initial Review by Jon Kissel |
Alternative medicine practice is a killer for me in movies, much like it is in real life. I am being told something about the user/practitioner, and it’s not flattering. There’s not a huge sample size (a term alt-med practitioners are allergic to) of films that engage with this topic, but one that comes to mind is druggy road-trip movie Crystal Fairy. Its woo-woo moron is treated as deeply unstable, loony, and damaged, and is made tolerable by the sheer intolerability of the protagonist. Beatriz at Dinner takes a similar tack. It resists canonizing its titular bullshit artist and humanizes her by putting her in sharp relief to someone with an antithetical belief system. Watching two unlikable people parry and thrust is de riguer for a domestic potboiler, and Miguel Arteta’s film is a strong version of that subgenre.
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We’ve been doing this long enough that anyone who’s paid attention to my reviews should know that I’m in on pretty much any movie about a cult. The Master is an all-timer, but my fascination with cults extends to smaller units than faux Scientology. Dogtooth is also in the top 50, and that’s a film where the cult is one family. Wherever there’s people telling bald-faced lies to fawning followers who unquestionably believe them, I’ll be there. Brigsby Bear immediately gets interest points by fitting in this box, but I can’t slap an A on every film whose premise pushes my buttons. The Master or something like Martha Marcy May Marlene are deeply curious about charismatic leaders, mindless ritual, and the creation of dogmatic rule systems, but Brigsby Bear is barely related to that kind of film. It uses a premise I often love to tell a story about making dreams into reality of the let’s-put-on-a-show variety, a premise I am much less fascinated by.
After 14 long years and sequels to “Toy Story (fine),” “Finding Nemo (sure),” “Monsters Inc. (ehh…)”, and a double-dose of “Cars (WHAT?!),” Pixar finally gives us the one movie that actually went out of its way to set up a sequel in “Incredibles 2.” The original, “The Incredibles,” holds up today as one of Pixar’s less-weighty and joyful movies in their catalog. Did the sequel do the same? Indeed it did, and maybe a little too closely.
The Meyerowitz Stories should be a film that hits close to home. I, like Ben Stiller’s Matthew, do not have a close relationship with my family. I moved across the country, putting hundreds of miles between myself and them pretty much only because I could and I wanted to. I don’t go home for holidays. I don’t particularly feel bad about any of that, despite a barely-audible, Danny-like voice in my ear wondering if maybe I should. The part of The Meyerowitz Stories that rhymes with my life, however, is also the one that makes this a frequently irritating film. I was just talking with Blair about how freeing it is to decide to not care what your parents think of you, and to see the characters here make their lives worse in pursuit of their shitty father’s approval is me knowing better than them, and I don’t know anything. Director Noah Baumbach repeatedly returns to films about sons and fathers, usually about the latter being too self-absorbed to care about the former. This is his most intense examination of that theme, but he covered all of it 13 years ago with Squid and the Whale. It’s one thing for teenagers to wake up to their father being human and fallible and a dick. It’s far less appealing when adults do the same.
This viewer is always going to be sympathetic to a story of waking up to the lazy falsehoods of unexamined tradition, and Come Sunday is exactly that. Having only recently listened to the excellent This American Life episode that inspired this adaptation of Reverend Carlton Pearson’s dark night of the soul, Joshua Marston and his talented cast caught me at just the right moment. The confluence of an evergreen theme and the freshness of the real story should’ve added up to a quality experience, but Come Sunday is too bland to make much of an impact. This story is powerful enough to get me tearing up at work when it’s in podcast form, but the cinematic version has me distracted and bored. |
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