Movie Review

Happiest Season (2020)

Remember that time you thought “If Hallmark just made holiday movies that were a little bit less heteronormative, the holiday season would be perfect!”

You were wrong.

Happiest Season centers on Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) as a couple who have gotten far enough along in their relationship that they’ve moved in together and, in typical American disapora fashion, still haven’t met each other’s families.

In Harper’s case, this is because they live in a city several hours’ drive away and in Abby’s case, as is repeatedly emphasized to the point that the fact is included every time Harper’s mother introduces Abby to someone, there is no family to meet because both her parents are dead.

Employing the usual holiday movie tropes – a new(ish) couple not entirely secure in their relationship status, family drama and traditions, and a high pressure event (Christmas) – Happiest Season hits all the notes you’d expect from a movie like this. What is unfortunate is how it gets there.

Set-ups for conflict get dropped into the plot the same way kids lost in the woods drop bread crumbs.

Instead of taking the risk and insisting to her mother that because of the packed house for the holidays it’s totally okay if she and Abby share a bed, Harper lets her mother put Abby in the basement bedroom where there is no lock on the door.

You know what happens next, right? In case you don’t, the inevitable scene where someone hides behind a door to avoid being found out may greatly delight you.

Expository dialogue designed to give us backstory in a compressed time frame strips the skilled actors in this cast of any opportunity to convey actual emotion beyond the most broad strokes. And this is the real disappointment of this movie: the leads have almost zero chemistry with each other.

When Harper’s secret high school girlfriend Riley (Aubrey Plaza) shows up as a foil to Abby’s growing irritation over the presence of Harper’s high school boyfriend Connor (Jake McDorman), the sexual tension between Riley and Abby is a welcome relief from wondering what Abby sees in Harper.

When the final emotional confrontation finally arrives it’s a doozy. Everyone spills secrets including that the “poor little orphan” schtick Abby has let drag on is a sham. Her parents died when she was 19 and she has plenty of happy family Christmas memories.

Add to this the ghastly brown wig someone thought to put on Mackenzie Davis, a wig so distracting for the first 20 minutes of the movie I couldn’t watch anything else, and the unearned family acceptance, and you’re left with a deep sense of disappointment. Given the cast and the writer/director (Clea Duvall), it feels like this could have been so much better.

Holiday romantic dramedies already draw their characters and their plots with the most broad-tipped marker. Just switching up some of the circumstances and the sexual orientations of the main characters doesn’t improve on that quality.

While it’s great to see more representation on screen, I fear that all Happiest Season has done is show us that movies with LGBTQ characters in the leads can be just as awful as movies where we don’t exist at all.

Rating

The Only Living Boy in New York (2017)

Meet Thomas (Callum Turner). Thomas is in love with Mimi (Kiersey Clemons) but even though they had one magical night together (August 8th), Mimi has a boyfriend and isn’t really interested in Thomas like that.

Thomas is estranged from Ethan (Pierce Brosnan) his cold, distant publisher father, who wants nothing more than for Thomas to find a purpose for his life, and concerned over the mental and emotional state of his fragile, clingy mother Judith (Cynthia Nixon). Thomas is also bored in only that way that privileged, self-satisfied young people seem to be able to be bored. New York is too sanitized for him any more. In fact, “New York’s most vibrant neighborhood at the moment is Philadelphia.” [Read more…] about The Only Living Boy in New York (2017)

Anonymous

Who was William Shakespeare?

Questions about William Shakespeare’s identity have been floating around since the 19th century with guesses as varied as Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. In 2007 Time Magazine reported on the public emergence of some 300 Shakespeare skeptics asking to be taken seriously. Among the signatories to that 2007 “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” was Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi who gives the prologue and epilogue that frame the story of Anonymous.

Opening near the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, we’re rapidly introduced to a wide cast of characters, both noble and not, including playwrite Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) who is plucked out of near obscurity by Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the 17th Earl of Oxford, who chooses Jonson to serve has his theatrical beard paying the struggling playwrite handsomely to present de Vere’s plays as his own.

Both the backstory and the current struggles to position the correct man to inherit the throne from a rapidly decaying Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave) intertwine with the political nature of de Vere’s plays.

Taken in by William Cecil (David Thewlis) after his father’s death, the young de Vere (Jamie Campbell Bower) agrees to marry Cecil’s only daughter as part of the price for covering up the killing of a houseman the Puritan Cecil had sent to de Vere’s chambers to find out if the young man was, indeed, composing plays and poems in defiance of Cecil’s wishes.

Young de Vere catches the eye of a younger Elizabeth (played in a wonderful bit of casting by Redgrave’s daughter Joely Richardson) leading to a torrid affair which results in the Queen’s pregnancy. Shunned for reasons not known to him when she is sent off to have the child away from the court’s prying eyes, de Vere begins a revenge affair with one of the Queen’s maids only to be exposed upon her return to London and banished from court for the remainder of his life. Before returning to his wife, de Vere manages to pry out of William Cecil information about his offspring, the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel) who in the film’s current time line allies himself with the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid) in his bid for Elizabeth’s throne.

Jonson, meanwhile, has an attack of conscience revealing to a middling theater actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) that he is just the front for the aristocrat who has actually penned the first brilliant play, Henry V, staged. Shakespeare, seizing the moment, steps into the spotlight as the groundlings call for the playwrite setting in motion what we are to believe is the biggest literary fraud ever perpetrated on the world.

Tensions mount as more of de Vere’s plays are staged and Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg), the hunchbacked son of William, takes over as Elizabeth’s closest advisor after his father’s death. Maneuvering to have both the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Southampton eliminated in favor of his candidate for King, James of Scotland, Cecil manipulates de Vere with the unwitting help of Ben Johnson.

The outcome of the story is, of course, known: James of Scotland becomes James I of England, Scotland, and Wales, William Shakespeare becomes the greatest author who ever lived, and Ben Jonson becomes England’s first Poet Laureate. While Anonymous makes an interesting case that Edward de Vere was the true author behind the words we attribute to William Shakespeare the movie also posits one stunning, unbelievable fact that can’t be revealed without spoiling the end of the film; the timing along strains credulity.

Anonymous is beautifully crafted and acted and a grown-up intellectual exercise into one of literary history’s greatest mysteries.

Tron: Legacy (IMAX 3D)

Let me say this up front: Olivia Wilde is not hard on the eyes. Olivia Wilde in skin tight clothing that features randomly glowing strips of light is especially not hard on the eyes. But even in IMAX 3D she wasn’t the coolest thing about Tron: Legacy.

The coolest thing about Tron: Legacy wasn’t the light cycle races, nor was it the batons that allowed Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and Quorra (Olivia Wilde) to transform into light cycles or equally impressive individual flying machines in a single pull. No, the coolest thing about Tron: Legacy is the hooded coat Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) wears when he leaves his remote hideaway and returns to “the grid.” Black as night on the outside and glowing from the inside, it’s the perfect metaphor for the movie’s themes and also the perfect indicator of one of the things wrong with Tron: Legacy. [Read more…] about Tron: Legacy (IMAX 3D)

Wanted

Drawn from Mark Millar’s hyper violent, supernatural comic of the same title, Wanted the movie drops both Millar’s supernatural elements and, frankly, the element of pure evil that made it vastly different from most of the “graphic novels” out there.

Wanted, both book and movie, is the story of Wesley Gibson a neurotic, anxiety prone, cheated upon, brow-beaten, dishrag of a man who just happens to be the son of the most talented assassin in the world. His recruitment by Fox (Angelina Jolie in a role that in the comic was clearly penned for Halle Berry) fills him and us in on the back story of The Fraternity, a group of assassins that has been operating for “thousands of years.” Their purpose: Kill one, a save thousand.

Sounds pretty far-fetched, right? This is where Hollywood had to deviate from Millar’s original text which has the Fraternity not as an altruistic order of killers descended from the practices of Christian monks but instead operating in a world where superheroes have all been conquered and The Professor has found a way to wipe the minds of everyone on the planet negating even the memory of those superheroes while he and his criminal peers who include an ancient Chinese warlord and a walking skeleton whose number one henchman is a living pile of excrement divide the planet up to rule as they see fit raping, killing, and thieving as it suits them. It is this deviation that is one of Wanted the movie’s major downfalls.

The film retains enough supernatural elements – the ability to “curve” a bullet, to jump a city block between office towers, to shoot someone from not hundreds of yards but miles away, a super-healing bath that can bring someone back from near death – that it stretches credulity even in a post-Matrix world. Granted, the stunts are amazing and it would be lovely to say that the devotion to the gun is typically American but sadly I can’t; Mark Millar is Scottish and Timur Bekmambetov, the film’s director, is Russian.

It was the necessity of making the characters and storyline even vaguely palatable to American audiences in the transition from graphic novel to film that is ultimately the film’s undoing. Wanted the comic celebrates not only the wantonness of violence but also takes pleasure in criminality for the sake of criminality; indeed, at one point Wesley, our nominal hero, wreaks violence on a bunch of police officers in a station house, including casually raping one of the female officers before he shoots her to death. This is not a set of characters or a storyline that corporate America (which is what Hollywood is) even at its most misogynistic and malevolent would dare to market.

Is it fair to judge Wanted-The Movie against Wanted-The Comic? Probably not. On its own the film is a slapdash, if intensely stylish, action film. To sharp to qualify in the “big, loud, and stupid” category, Wanted doesn’t even make for a good afternoon’s entertainment.