After his wife passes away, a Hasidic cantor enlists the aide of a community college biology teacher when he becomes obsessed with determining how long it will take her body to return to the earth. This movie is a very understated comedy. It's surprsingly clever and funny. It's wonderful to see Son of Saul's Geza Rohrig in something wacky and fresh. Matthew Broderick is absolutely hysterical. This is one zany buddy comedy! 5/5 |
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Maggie's Plan is pretty bad. Greta Gerwig is a really tough sell...Netflix sold me on Julianne Moore and Bill Hader. Maggie, wants to have a baby so right when she's about to artificially inseminate herself with a pickle man's sperm Ethan Hawke decides he loves Maggie and not his wife Julianne Moore, who is a German anthropologist with whom he has 2 children. Maggie and Ethan Hawke have a baby and the movie skips ahead 3 years. Maggie, caught with the reality of being married to a selfish man who thinks nothing of leaving his family for a someone new willy-nilly, tries to make herself feel better after growing tired of her marriage/affair and conspires with Julianne Moore to get the original family back together. Meanwhile, the pickle man has the worst accent ever and I feel really bad for the aussie actor stuck with more than he can handle. Bill Hader is the only one who calls Maggie on her bull shit in this whole movie. All in all, this is an annoying movie. At no time did I care about anyone in this atrocious mess. I had much higher hopes for a Rebecca Miller film...but this is a movie about a bunch of pretentious, bourgeoisie, hipster intellectual assholes. 1/5 Crescendo!: The Power of Music is an American documentary focused on a worldwide music education program, El Sistema, as it expands to the United States. The film focuses on three youth orchestras; one in Harlem New York and two in West Philadelphia. This is an excellent documentary about the power of music in the lives of inner city youth. 5/5 The Dwarvenaut is a crowd pleasing bizarre sub-culture doc. It follows entrepreneur/artist Stephan Pokorny as he leads his Bushwick based company "Dwarven Forge" through their third Kickstarter campaign. Pokorny's company Dwarven Forge hand sculpts interchangeable miniature modular terrain for Dungeons & Dragons gaming such as dungeons, caverns, and "Valoria" a complete complex city with its own history and lore. The Dwarvenaut follows Pokorny to gaming conventions as he works to pull off a $2million Kickstarter campaign. Pokorny's passion, talent, and skill combined with his likability and quirkiness make this a fun and delightful film going experience where the audience is rooting for Dwarven Forge's success even if they've never played a game like D&D before. 4/5 Robert Frank Don't Blink is one of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time. Director Laura Israel follows Frank, allowing him to muse on camera more than she probes him with questions, in general letting Frank be Frank without the rigid boundaries of a straight-forward documentary. Director and photographer Frank is an fascinating subject. Israel expertly steers clear of presenting this doc as a linear, biographical, talking heads-style film instead presenting a meditation on Frank very much in the experimental and evocative style of an Agnes Varda film. I was very fortunate to catch a screening of Frank's Cocksucker Blues, Frank's never released documentary on the Rolling Stones during their Exile on Main Street tour. I saw it this last summer at the Telluride Film Festival and so this fell in my lap at the perfect time. I have to admit that, however, of Frank's oeuvre, I've only seen Cocksucker Blues and Candy Mountain. Candy Mountain was his only feature film and it's really quite a good 1980s rock'n'roll road movie with Tom Waits and Buster Poindexter. Now, I'm on a mission to see all the others. I can't recommend this film highly enough! 5/5 Tickled is one of the most intriguing and strange documentaries I've seen in a while. This is a film about a journalist from New Zealand who stumbles on a weird website about "Competitive Endurance Tickling" and in doing so, inadvertently happens to uncover a very tangled and twisted plot of blackmail and threats, reaching far beyond investigating a strange youtube video and the production company behind it and others like it. This is super fascinating and bizarre. 4/5 I tend to shy away from biopics because of all the fictionalizing, romanticizing, and fabricating. Greetings from Tim Buckley is a solid biopic in that it preoccupies it's time by mainly focusing on one major event, the 1991 Greetings from Tim Buckley tribute concert at St Anna's Church in New York which marked son Jeff Buckley's first public performance in memory of the father he only met twice. Focusing on this one event dispels with unnecessarily dramatizing the back story and isolates the flashbacks to a fictionalized account of father Tim's philandering and wild ways. Penn Bagley holds his own, especially given that he sang live and Jeff's range and style are wide, tricky, and nuanced. 3/5 The Drop is a pretty good crime drama about a seemingly simple bartender, Bob (Tom Hardy) who finds himself in the aftermath of a botched robbery. Meanwhile, Bob adopts an abandoned, abused puppy and sparks a friendship with a neighborhood girl over caring for the puppy. Like most heist movies this is a bit convoluted but I liked that the crime narrative took a back seat to the puppy storyline. Once again, Hardy is exceptional here as Bob . Without a doubt, Hardy is a very physical actor who really lives in the body of each character he plays. Also, he's very good at American accents and accents are hard. The Drop is also one of James Gandolfini's last films. He's excellent, as always. 3/5 |
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