If you can't grab us by the one-third mark, you take your chances of getting the plug pulled on you. Here are two streamers that just went nowhere slowly.
Comment: I gave this until past the one-third mark to allow Todd Haynes ("Carol") to introduce some sort of hook to keep me watching the fictionalized account of the Mary Kay LeTourneau story -- framed as a pompous actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visiting the disgraced former teacher, here called Gracie (Haynes regular Julianne Moore), in order to study for a movie about the woman's life. Very little happens as Portman's character methodically interviews the people in Gracie's life and observes the passive-aggressive family dynamics Gracie created with the person she seduced when he was 13 but is now 36, Joe (a dull Charles Melton). This all plays out like the made-for-TV film that seems to be in the works in the movie. And the score is glaringly out of place. It kept reminding me of a cheesy '70s TV show or film -- and what do you know, it is a reworking of the score from the 1971 British film "The Go-Between." So I'm not crazy; Haynes is. Portman is all breathy affect, and there's just not enough attention paid to Gracie or Joe. I finally bailed when the middle third started with a visit to Gracie's lawyer and Gracie's son from her first marriage (a former classmate of Joe's), who is a complete asshole and whose band plays songs that 62-year-old Haynes thinks a Millennial would think are cool to cover: Peter Frampton's "Baby I Love Your Way" and Leon Russell's "Tight Rope." It wasn't worth going on and waiting for the inevitable sex scene between Elizabeth and Joe and whatever fallout, if any, results from it. That's not a spoiler, just an assumption.
Comment: Speaking of made-for-TV movies, this Amazon original is a melodramatic period piece about two sisters in Rio de Janeiro whose lives take different paths when they are teenagers back in the repressed 1950s and who apparently spend the rest of the movie headed toward some sort of reunion. I did not make it that far. This is about as melodramatic as a modern movie gets. The two girls (Julia Stockler and Carol Duarte) fall under the thumb of their macho working-class father. One of them runs off to Greece with a sailor but eventually returns home pregnant. But meantime, the other has gone off to pursue a music career (but not before getting date-raped on her wedding night). There is nothing compelling about their personalities. The storytelling is strictly by-the-numbers. It is not only initially set in the '50s but it has an old-fashioned sensibility about it that is downright corny. No offense to Karim Ainouz, but lush melodramas just don't fly these days.
BONUS TRACK
I've always loved "Tight Rope." But then, I'm 61 now and remember when it came out. My affinity for this and Cat Stevens' "Morning Is Broken" got me mocked a lot as a sensitive tween.
No comments:
Post a Comment