Widows

Widows (2018)

Starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Carrie Coon, Lukas Haas, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall, and Liam Neeson

Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Gillian Flynn and Steve McQueen

Summary (in 500 words or less):  After their criminal husbands are killed while attempting to complete a robbery, their widowed wives are forced to contemplate committing a crime of their own when a shady man demands money their husbands owed him.

 

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  B

The Post

The Post (2017)

Starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Carrie Coon, Jesse Plemons, Matthew Rhys, and Bruce Greenwood

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer

Summary (in 500 words or less): Washington Post owner Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) -- the first female owner of a major newspaper -- and editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) are struggling to keep their paper afloat in the early 1970s.  The New York Times -- one of their major competitors -- breaks a huge story about multiple presidential administrations hiding information about the Vietnam War from the American public.  This classified info was admittedly stolen from the US government and the Nixon administration sues them to stop the release of any more info. Fortunately for the Washington Post, a secret informant drops that same information off to them and Graham and Bradlee are faced with the challenge of whether to publish the information or not.

• A true story, Spielberg's The Post feels a bit languid, slow, and plodding.  
• A good performance from Meryl Streep -- seriously, I keep wanting to not like her in things, but I can't -- balances out a less successful turn from Tom Hanks who, despite having some backstory given to his character, never really connected with me.
• Much like Hanks not connecting with me, the film itself didn't either.  Spielberg's direction felt a bit stiff and stolid, and while I liked the way the film looked and some camera angles here and there, it's just bland and unexciting.
• The script by Liz Hannah and John Singer thinks it cleverly is inserting subtle jabs at the current administration and praise of the #MeToo movement, but they're so blatantly displayed by Spielberg that it often proves to be laughable.  Particularly towards the end, the feminism angle is ridiculously displayed -- Streep's Graham leaves a Supreme Court hearing to find herself surrounded by cheering throngs of women as the music swells around her.  Ridiculous.  The film didn't need that -- we already saw what a strong and committed woman Graham was...we didn't need the silly visual.
• This may be a film that generationally simply doesn't work.  Perhaps the older crowd -- re: those around in the Vietnam War era -- may feel more connection and excitement with the unfolding story.  To me, however, I was left disappointed.

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Gone Girl

Gone Girl (2014)

Starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Missi Pyle, Patrick Fugit, Casey Wilson, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, and Sela Ward

Directed by David Fincher

From a story perspective, Gone Girl is my kind of movie -- a suspense thriller with twists and turns galore that never feel forced or simply added for "Gotcha!" moments.  When his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) finds himself at the center of a controversy with the media (including a pushy Nancy Grace-esque commentator played by Missi Pyle) who presume his guilt and local law enforcement who also find many things about him questionable.  However, as the film unfolds, we realize that things are not always as they seem and believable surprises await around many corners.

It's tough to delve into exactly why I love Gone Girl so much without revealing spoilers, so I'll leave the summary above as the only plot points to be revealed (and spoilers will come with the inevitable Year in Review posts sometime next year).  Needless to say, it is the plot and the script by Gillian Flynn (who also penned the novel upon which the movie is based) that is the star of the show here.  While the acting, directing, and other aspects of the production are all solid, it's the intricate plot and the devious nature of our main characters that really pushes this story over the edge.  Multiple times during the movie, the audience whom I watched the film with let out sounds of audible shock.  Oftentimes in films, these shocking moments don't resonate because we don't find them a natural progression for the characters that inhabit the screen.  However, in Gone Girl these moments are legitimate paths that we believe are set for the characters.  Flynn takes moments that could've absolutely been ridiculously off-the-wall and makes them innately plausible.  It's a task that isn't easy, but rich character development is essential for this to occur and that's certainly achieved here.

Hand-in-hand with that essential character development are actors who can bring to life what Flynn puts on the page and there's not a bad apple in the bunch in Gone Girl.  From headliners Affleck and Pike to the lesser known Carrie Coon and Kim Dickens to the "I can't believe these guys are in this" Neil Patrick Harris (as a former obsessive lover of Amy's) and Tyler Perry (!!) (as Nick's well-to-do intelligent defense attorney), all rise to the occasion.  Essentially playing two different roles thanks to flashbacks, both Affleck and Pike bring to life the joy of the initial pangs of love along with the ennui and frustration that so many marriages suffer after the honeymoon phase has dissipated.  Gone Girl tackles what happens after the facades of first impressions are broken down and the two leads do a fantastic job of bringing this to life.

Nice chemistry is also had between Affleck and both Ms. Coon and Ms. Dickens, though in different ways.  Coon's Margo -- Nick Dunne's twin sister -- is perhaps the character the audience latches onto the most because she is tasked with being the most levelheaded of anyone onscreen.  She tells it like it is to her brother and becomes frustrated with him (much like the audience) when he does stupid things that point towards his guilt in the disappearance of his wife.  The loving repartee between Affleck and Coon makes them completely believable siblings.  Countering that, the contentiousness felt between Affleck and Kim Dickens' detective Rhonda Boney is a nice aspect of the story as well.  Much like several relationships in the film, Nick and Rhonda's attitudes towards one another fluidly shift as the movie progresses, but Dickens brings a tough, though deliberately smart quality to what could've been a rote character in a film like this.

Director David Fincher places the focus of the flick on two things -- how the media shapes the way we act and how the way we act is shaped by how we want to impress others.  These two incredibly similar concepts intertwine to great effect in Gone Girl which I think is a better film overall than his much revered The Social Network a few years ago and may very well be his most entertaining film to date.  Stretching to a nearly two-and-a-half hour length, the epic nature of this one couple's lies, love, and emotional compromises moves along at such a rapid pace that I found myself longing for the film to continue on for another hour, wanting to know how various characters' lives were affected by the film's final outcome.  Fincher pieces Flynn's screenplay together like a puzzle and as the picture becomes clearer we see just how disturbed Amy and Nick's relationship truly is, was, or perhaps will be.

The RyMickey Rating:  A

Theater Review - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Written by Edward Albee

Directed by Pam MacKinnon

Where: Booth Theatre, New York City, NY

When: Wednesday, January 16, 2pm

The liquor is free-flowing in Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and once the booze settles into their systems, the quartet of characters who make up the cast say many things they'll soon regret.  Much like the recently released film Carnage (and, I'd assume, it's basis the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf puts two outwardly civilized couples into a room only to have them prove just how animalistic they can become when circumstances become unfriendly.

Here, we meet Martha and George (Amy Morton and Tracy Letts), both in their late forties/early fifties, who have probably seen better days in their marriage based off of their initial conversations with each other.  George is a history professor at a New England university while Martha's father is the President of the same school.  After a party honoring new faculty members, Martha invites the twentysomething couple Nick and Honey (Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon) over to their home for a nightcap.  Nick was recently hired in the biology department and Martha wants to get to know them better, much to the chagrin of George who just wants to call it a night.  As the two couples sit and chat, their true personalities -- not the overly friendly facades put on at parties -- begin to surface and words are bandied about that probably should have remained unspoken.  

In a play with just four cast members during which most of the performers never leave the stage for three hours, every member of the quartet needs to be strong and this production certainly succeeds in that department.  Tracy Letts is perhaps best known for his writing including the wonderfully creepy Bug (made into a movie starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon) and the critically acclaimed (though incredibly overrated) August: Osage County, but this is my first experience with him as an actor.  His George is outwardly quiet in his Mr. Rogers-style cardigan, but prone to outbursts that increase in more menacing ways as the play progresses.  I will admit that the character took me a bit to get used to (you could tell the simmering anger was just below the surface and you really just wanted it to make an appearance), but by the end, George proves that he's incredibly adept at sneaky manipulation which Letts's tone didn't necessarily suggest at the play's outset.  

Amy Morton's Martha is just as scheming as George, but she never even attempts to hide this quality below the surface.  Instead, Martha here is constantly poking and prodding at her husband, constantly trying to belittle and emasculate him.  And it isn't just her partner whom she twists around under her thumb.  She does the same with their younger guests (as does George) as poor Nick and Honey are forced to join the cruel mind games set forth by the unhappy older couple.

Although the play certainly belongs to Letts and Morton and their vicious tete-a-tetes, Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon absolutely hold their own with Coon in particular making the most of a difficult role that makes her act quite quiet and prudish at the play's beginning, but then shift to a drunken fool as the evening advances.  Playing drunk always runs the risk of coming off seeming fake, but Coon seems to be hilariously accurate in her descent.

While I certainly appreciated the performances from the actors and the dialog from writer Edward Albee (my first experience with this playwright), I found a fundamental flaw after the play concluded that I just couldn't shake.  Why the hell didn't Nick and Honey just walk out the door rather than be berated and essentially used by George and Martha?  There was nothing keeping the younger couple there, so despite there being a bit of an answer given at the play's end as to why they stuck around, I couldn't really buy it.  Still, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was great fun.  The three hours absolutely flew by and I found the play still resonates fifty years after it was first presented.