Movie Review Nellie and Nadine

Nellie and Nadine (2022) 

Directed by Magnus Gertten 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Nadine Hwang, Nelly Mousset-Vos, Sylvia Bianchi 

Release Date December 16th, 2022 

Published December 16th, 2022 

The miracles that needed to occur to create the love story of Nadine Hwang and Nelly Mousset-Vos are incalculable. First, an Asian woman needed to find herself in Paris around the time of the start of World War 2. She needs to join the French resistance and be betrayed by a friend and sent to a concentration camp. At the same time, an Opera singer in Brussels has to also join the resistance and also be betrayed, after saving countless lives, and end up at that same concentration camp, Ravensbruck. 

They then must meet, fall in love, and survive the concentration camp. They end up being separated as they are being liberated from the camp with each settling back where they were, Nadine in France and Nelly in Brussels. They must exchange letters, and agree to meet and get back together, upending the lives of Nelly's family, including a teenage daughter, and they must move to Venezuela, a place where there was  community of LGBTQ people waiting for them. 

It's all entirely improbable but it happened. The new documentary, Nelly and Nadine from the remarkable documentary filmmaker, Magnus Gertten has brought this story to the world and in doing so he's rescued one remarkable piece of world history and a landmark love story in the history of LGBTQ people. It's astonishing, beautiful, heart-rending, and inspiring. That this isn't already an Oscar winning movie is shocking, it's something that has future Best Picture winner written all over it. 

For years, the documentation of this immaculate love story languished in an attic on the French countryside. Remember the teenage daughter I mentioned earlier, Nelly's daughter, she wasn't her mother's biggest fan. Thus, the family history wasn't merely uncelebrated, it went unmentioned. That woman's daughter, now grown and mother herself, Sylvie Bianchi, recalls knowing and loving her grandmother Nelly, visiting her home in Venezuela, but Nadine was only known as grandma Nelly's roommate. 

Little did Sylvie know, that after her grandmother passed and her things were brought back to Belgium, there was an entire lifetime of history sitting in a box that was deemed to emotionally painful to open up and examine. So, how did this story finally find the light? That's where the amazing Magnus Gertten comes in. While working on a project to identify women in some super 8 footage he'd found of women liberated from concentration camps, he stumbled over Nelly and Nadine, at first unaware that they were connected. 

Find my complete review at Pride.Media 

Movie Review Babylon

Babylon (2022) 

Directed by Damian Chazelle 

Written by Damian Chazelle 

Starring Margot Robbe, Brad Pitt, 

Release Date December 25th, 2022 

Published December 12th, 2022 

Babylon is an outright disaster. From minute one to minute last, this careening, gross, nightmare of Hollywood decadence never finds its feet. The point, I assume. is for the movie to be dizzying and disorienting, but it's a little too effective at evoking that feeling. It's nice to be on wild ride but Babylon rarely relents to let you catch your breath. That might be okay if we were more invested in the characters caught up in this tornado of activity but these characters are too thin and stock for us to cling to them amid the storm. 

Babylon stars Margot Robbe as Nellie LaRoy, an ambitious young actress, eager to be the biggest star in the world while also being the biggest personality in every room. We meet Nellie at a party where she comes bursting in, in search of cocaine. Nellie finds what she's looking for with the aid of Manny Torres (Diego Calva), an assistant to the Hollywood heavyweight who is throwing this massive party. The party happens to have an entire room full of cocaine which Nellie gobbles up quickly and with abandon. 

Urging Manny to abandon his job, tending to the party guests, Nellie gets him enjoying the cocaine as well and the two develop a quick friendship, though it's clear that Manny is smitten. Circumstances part the new friends as the wild party finds a woman dying from an overdose that requires Manny to move her body, and a large elephant whose appearance gives cover to the body being smuggled out the back door of the expansive party. 

The dead girl is fortuitous for Nellie as the young woman was supposed to play a big role in a movie the following day. Nellie is spotted at the party and tapped to take the dead girl's place. Working on no sleep, running on pure adrenalin and cocaine, Nellie nails the part with her incredible talent for crying on command. This is a silent movie breakthrough for Nellie as the camera clearly loves her while the lack of lines needing to be memorized or performed, means her deep New Jersey accent is covered up. 

Meanwhile, Manny is tasked with tending to the needs of Hollywood's top leading man, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). After driving the drunken Conrad home, and watching him nearly die in a pool accident, Manny is invited to help Conrad get to the set of his newest blockbuster that same day. This means maybe an hour of sleep before a 16 hour day on set. Even with the exhaustion, the stars in Manny's eyes drive him to become essential to the finishing of the picture. 

It's Manny who gets the task or renting a new camera after several other cameras were destroyed in the midst of the epic filming of fight scenes involving Roman soldiers. Manny saves the day and his career as a Hollywood Producer, Director, and all around go-to guy begins. Naturally, this will bring him back into the orbit of Nellie though it appears that any romance between the two just isn't in the cards. Manny and Nellie appear to be star-crossed for life. 

The middle portion of the three hour car wreck that is Babylon, deals with the arrival of the talking picture in Hollywood. Nellie and Jack's careers are devastated by sound. For Nellie, having to memorize lines, being unable to move around under the strictures of a new sounds set up, and her New Jersey accent, stunt her career just as she was becoming a big star. Jack meanwhile, doesn't know how to project his star power with his voice. Suddenly, the period piece romances that had been his bread and butter, seem silly with his modern American accent. 

Manny, on the other hand, appears to thrive. He becomes a big deal at the studio where he works. He's a director and a producer and he oversees several film projects at once. Among his best work is making a star of a little known trumpet player. Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) was seen at the party where the film opened and from there was hired to score some silent films. With Manny in charge, and sound pictures becoming a massive hit, Sidney becomes a superstar on the big screen, though not without some compromises that he's not all that comfortable with. 

Manny's fortunes turn on his attempts to save Nellie's career. As her career flounders, Nellie tries and fails to get clean, getting off cocaine and alcohol, but she's quickly sucked back into her addictions as she struggles in the sound era. Her career is officially flushed following an incident at the home of William Randolph Hearst where Nellie clashes with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, and refuses to allow the famed newspaper magnate to grope her. How this scene ends is weird and gross, and a strong referendum as to whether you are willing to buy in on director Damian Chazelle's odd vision of Babylon. 

For me, I was out of Babylon just minutes into the start of the movie. One of the first things to happen in Babylon is an elephant pooping in epic fashion all over a poor day laborer. The metaphor is clear, the little people in Hollywood, the ones who make life possible for the rich, famous and powerful, are getting pooped on. In this case, that's not just a metaphor. A few short scenes later we're forced to confront a man with a fetish for being urinated on. And to make sure we cover all of our grossest bases, the Hearst mansion scene ends with vomiting that would make Mr. Creosote blush. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review The Almond and the Seahorse

The Almond and the Seahorse (2022) 

Directed by Celyn Jones, Tom Stern

Written by Celyn Jones, Kaite O'Reilly

Starring Rebel Wilson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Celyn Jones, Tryne Dyrholm 

Release Date December 16th, 2022 

Published December 15th, 2022 

The Almond and the Seahorse stars Rebel Wilson in a rare dramatic role. Wilson is Sarah, an archaeologist who is married to Joe (Celyn), a gregarious house husband. At least, that's what you assume if you don't know what The Almond and the Seahorse is really about. You see, Joe isn't merely unemployed, he's not staying home by choice. Joe had a brain tumor that has caused irreparable damage to his memory which slips away more and more as each day passes. 

Sarah has tried to care for Joe using medication and list-making, and tapes that remind him of who he is and why he can't leave home or what might happen if he left home unsupervised. Eventually however, Sarah will be forced to admit that she can no longer care for Joe on her own. Joe is going to have to go to a facility that can care for him as his memory continues to deteriorate. Sarah thus is dealing with losing Joe both emotionally and physically as he forgets who she is and is no longer under her care. 

Running concurrent to Sarah and Joe's story is that of Toni (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Gwen (Tryne Dyrholm), a long term couple who have lived with Gwen's traumatic brain injury from a car accident for more than 15 years. Recently, Gwen has begun to no longer recognize Toni who has begun to show her age. For Gwen, she's not left the day of their accident and thus Toni has slowly become a stranger to her as she no longer recognizes her as her wife. 

Like Joe, Gwen has reached a point in her growing memory loss that she can no longer live at home. She's become a danger to herself who wakes up in the morning thinking a stranger is in her bed. Gwen and Joe will each be living at a hospital facility overseen by Dr. Falmer (Meera Syal), a loving and thoughtful woman who does nearly as much to help Sarah and Toni as she does for Joe and Gwen. The people left behind in the wake of those losing their memories are suffering nearly as much and need nearly as much care. 

The title, The Almond and the Seahorse, is a reference to the shapes that make up the parts of the brain that retain memory. Beyond that, the title reflects the strange and jarring storytelling, seemingly disconnected moments that seem like reality but have an uncanny quality because one person in the scene sees reality a little differently than another character. Joe, for one, thinks Sarah is the one who is having delusions and acting strangely. He doesn't remember his tumor or recognize that he's changed in any way since the tumor was removed. 

Gwen, more frighteningly, wakes up each morning screaming for her wife and unable to recognize that Toni is standing in front of her. Imagine what that must be like, waking in fear every morning and taking most of the day to recover from that. Each day becomes more of a struggle for Toni to reach her wife, calm her, soothe her, and then losing her all over again by the end of the day. It's heartbreaking to imagine and Charlotte Gainsbourg and Tryne Dyrholm bring that heartbreak to devastating light in The Almond and the Seahorse. 

If the film isn't fully successful it's because there is a rather rote quality to the drama. A sort of surface level presentation of the material that limits your emotional involvement. So much of the film is obsessed with the upturning of day to day routine for these two couples that the film fails to build out beyond the surface to illustrate the full breadth of what has been lost here. We empathize with these characters but only on a basic level. Our empathy is limited by not getting to know these characters as the movie focuses the showier parts of their story, the dramatic loss of memory and the bigger emotional displays that come with that. 

There is a focus, unfortunately, in The Almond and the Seahorse, on the more showy, actorly aspects of memory loss in these movie characters. Celyn Jones especially, in his role in front of and behind the camera, favors Joe's broader expressions of his memory loss. We get little grounding in who Joe was and what we are left with is the struggle as expressed in the broad enacting of trauma and the growing emptiness behind Joe's eyes. Jones is a fine actor but, I needed more than his big performance to connect me to this character beyond a basic sense of empathy. 

As for Rebel Wilson, in her first major dramatic leading role, she's overmatched here. Stripped of her sense of humor, Wilson seems not to know what to do with herself in any given scene. I'm thinking specifically of a scene in a library where she's left the ringer on her phone on and it continuously interrupts the quiet of the library. The scene is pointless, it has no purpose. It's the kind of scene in any other Rebel Wilson movie where she would do some kind of bit, a physical or verbal gag. Since however, this is a drama and not a Pitch Perfect movie, Wilson is left to being awkwardly apologetic. Why did this scene exist? 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Aftersun

Aftersun (2022) 

Directed by Charlotte Wells 

Written by Charlotte Wells 

Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall 

Release Date October 21st, 2022 

Published December 14th, 2022 

Aftersun is a quiet and thoughtful meditation on the struggles of growing up as both a child and a young parent. Paul Mescal stars in the film as Calum Paterson, the father of Sophie (Frankie Corio), a precocious young woman. Together, father and daughter are taking a holiday in Turkey, some time in the late 90s. It's unclear why Dad chose this location or whether he could even afford such a vacation, his work back home in England seems unstable, at best, based on a few snatches of dialogue throughout the film. 

First time director Charlotte Wells takes a fly on the wall approach to Aftersun which gives the storytelling a strongly authentic feel. Father and daughter talk but the drama of the story is in what is not said. It comes from the moments when Calum, clearly struggling with his mental health, likely depression, does everything he can not to let on to his daughter that something is wrong. He already feels guilty for not being around more, he and Sophie's mother have split up, and he's struggling with being young and not knowing how to be a father. 

The film story evolves through a series of set pieces, seemingly mundane moments of father-daughter bonding. Swimming, sun tanning, dinners, video games, even a little pool hustling, dad and daughter have an unconventional relationship. Calum is a loving father, he takes his fatherly authority seriously but he's also young, inexperienced, and rather clueless about how to be a dad to a growing young woman. He's filled with love but also fear, confusion, and mild ambivalence. He's fighting internally over whether Sophie could be happier without him. 

What happens with Calum is a bit of a mystery. We know that this vacation occurred in the pre-internet past. No cell phones or email. We know, from flash forwards to an older Sophie, played by Celia Rowlson-Hall, that Calum was, at the very least, absent from his daughter's life some time after this vacation. And we know from a series of brief dream sequences that there is antipathy between father and daughter though what that antipathy extends from, we don't know, we assume it comes from his absence. 

Charlotte Wells is deliberately vague about Calum's motivations and what his intentions are after having spent this week on vacation with his daughter. The temptation is to assume that he may have committed suicide but there is no direct indication that this is what occurred. Aftersun subtly and brilliantly leaves bread crumbs that could lead in that direction but the movie isn't about setting you up for a big gut punch, this is an observant human drama where you will have to discern for yourself what the outcome may be. 

Aftersun is a gorgeous film, the locations are lovely but also fitting of a man who can't afford luxury but appears to be spending all that he has for what luxury he can get. The father-daughter dynamic is lovely with Frankie Corio delivering a charming performance, never too precocious, never beyond her years. She's observant, and she does act as an audience avatar, trying hard to understand her loving yet inscrutable father, but she's mostly just a kid who loves her dad. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Documentary Review Call Me Miss Cleo

Call Me Miss Cleo (2022) 

Directed by Jennifer Brea, Celia Aniskovich

Written by Documentary

Starring Miss Cleo 

Release Date December 15th, 2022 (HBO Max) 

Published December 14th, 2022 

Call Me Miss Cleo is high level cringe. This is a rare documentary where the filmmakers and the subjects appear equally delusional about the subject they are discussing. In this case, the subject is late former fake TV psychic, Miss Cleo, real name Youree Dell Harris. In the 1990s, Harris invented the character of Miss Cleo while working as a playwright and performer in Los Angeles at the Langston Hughes Theater. Then, she left for Florida where the character of Miss Cleo became a full on persona that Harris adopted and claimed was real. 

Picked up by a pair of con artists operating a fake psychic hotline, Miss Cleo jumped off the screen. She was a charismatic pitch woman whose staged phone calls which involved her seeming to read the minds of callers and giving them important information and advice, became not merely a local sensation, she was quickly a nationwide phenomenon. Late night television become Miss Cleo's home and her broad, FAKE Jamaican accent cut through the detritus of her infomercial competition to garner a loyal following. 

Behind the scenes, Miss Cleo would remain in character at all times despite rarely, if ever, taking a live call from one of the millions of desperate people who called her psychic hotline. Instead of Miss Cleo, callers to the Psychic Readers Network would end up talking to an underpaid, completely unlicensed, part time worker whose job it was to keep people on the phone for 5 minutes, regardless of what the person was calling about it. 

In the strongest portion of Call Me Miss Cleo, the documentary brings forward the people who answered calls to the Psychic Readers Network who express regret over their role in bilking desperate people looking for Miss Cleo's sage, Jamaican Shaman, view of their future. Most people who called were desperate, sad, lonely individuals who could not afford these calls but hoped against hope that a look into their future might solve their problems. People who likely needed real help from mental health professionals were instead consoled and lied to by part time employees pretending to be avatars of a fake Jamaican Shaman and Psychic. 

Then, as quickly as Miss Cleo became a cultural phenomenon, she was gone. Lawsuits filed against the con artists who employed Miss Cleo and the part time fake psychics on the 800 number she shilled for, led to the end of the Psychic Readers Network. As for Miss Cleo, she managed to escape the lawsuit. Legal documentation exists that legally defines Miss Cleo as little more than a mascot for the 800 number, a pitch woman and actress hired to perpetuate a brand. And yet, Miss Cleo never stopped living as Miss Cleo, Jamaican accented psychic. 

Here is where the documentary, Call Me Miss Cleo, takes a turn into cringe territory. Interviews with friends of Miss Cleo work very hard to rehab her image from con artist to beloved and supportive friend and real psychic. Miss Cleo's closest friends maintain to this day, several years after Cleo herself passed away at the relatively young age of 54, that she was an actual psychic. Cleo lived the gimmick to the end and found a circle of friends who enabled her to live this lie to the last days of her life. 

The presentation of these interviews with Miss Cleo's friends contains a strong indication that the filmmakers are joining in an effort to rehabilitate Miss Cleo's reputation. The final act of Call Me Miss Cleo is a loving appreciation of Miss Cleo, her coming out as Gay, and her support of the LGBTQ community. These are wonderful things and they should be embraced and celebrated but while the documentary does that, we also lose the perspective that this was a delusional person who pretended to be Jamaican psychic until the day she died. 

Making things extra cringe, is how Miss Cleo's circle of friends is entirely made up of white people. I don't feel I can say this with the kind of authority that a black critic could, but it needs to be said. The final act portrays Miss Cleo's circle as having their very own 'Magical Negro' in real life. Miss Cleo pretended to be a sage Jamaican psychic and her friends all accepted and furthered that delusion. The documentary doesn't portray this as strange or wrong, but rather as kind of wholesome and perfectly normal. 

I feel like the documentary should be slightly critical about this fact. Perhaps the question should be asked as to why this group of people felt it was appropriate to further this woman's delusion. These people appear to genuinely care about Miss Cleo but that doesn't make this situation normal. Really nothing about this is normal. Miss Cleo created a reputation that was built upon stealing from poor desperate people and finished her life not ashamed or repentant, but instead remaining in character, alleviating her guilt by keeping up the lie in every moment of her life. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review: One Fine Morning

One Fine Morning (2022) 

Directed by Mia Hansen Love 

Written by Mia Hansen Love 

Starring Lea Seydoux, Pascal Gregory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia 

Release Date December 9th, 2022 

Published December 13th, 2022 

One Fine Morning stars Lea Seydoux as Sandra, a lonely, French, single mom. Sandra's days center on her lovely daughter and visiting her ailing father, Georg. Sandra's father is slowly slipping away following a stroke. He can no longer care for himself and much of the movie is about him being shuffled from one care center to another as Sandra, her sister, and her mother, try to find a place that will take good care of Georg in his final years.

Sandra's story shifts when she runs into an old friend at the park with her daughter. Clement (Melvil Poupaud), was a friend of Sandra's late husband. The two always had chemistry but she was married and so was he. He still is married but that doesn't stop him from openly flirting with Sandra. For her part, Sandra welcomes the flirting and more. Despite some reservations, Sandra welcomes Clement to her bed and the two begin a fraught affair. 

Meanwhile, Sandra is helping to pack up the life of her father. The once great man, a professor of literature, defined by the books he loved, can no longer remember the stories that made him who he was. In a lovely monologue, Sandra explains to her young daughter why her grandfather's books meant so much to him. It's one of the most emotional and lovely moments in any film in 2022. I can't do it justice by trying to repeat it, just see this movies. 

One Fine Morning is not the kind of movie that lingers on scenes, it's a movie that lingers in feeling. Director Mia Hansen Love crafts an emotional world and the movie lives in these feelings, this airy, open, often raw, emotional spaces. The story may appear stagnant to the impatient observer, but Hansen-Love and her cast are slowly carrying you along on an emotional wave, one that doesn't crash so much as it crests lovingly, caressing the beaches of bigger meanings and emotional truth. 

Find my complete review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Spoiler Alert

Spoiler Alert (2022) 

Directed by Michael Showalter 

Written by Michael Showalter

Starring Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, Sally Field, Bill Irwin 

Release Date December 9th, 2022 

Published December 12th, 2022 

Spoiler Alert stars former Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons as television critic Michael Ausiello. Michael lives for TV having grown up in a broken home and watching daytime soap operas with his mother. As we join Michael's story, it's 2004, and Michael is deeply neurotic, laden with anxiety and insecurities, and generally working endless hours to avoid life. Then, a friend drags him out to a bar for a night out. As Michael very unnaturally wears a Yankees cap, it's jock night at the bar, he manages to lock eyes with Kit (Ben Aldridge), and sparks fly. 

Initially, it's just a hook up, Kit claims to prefer the occasional fling. However, both men start to catch feelings rather quickly and a romance begins to bloom. The only thing standing in their way are their equally formidable emotional hurdles. For Michael, this includes a host of things he must talk to a therapist about. As for Kit, he has not told his parents, Marilyn and Bob (Sally Field and Bill Irwin), that he's gay. Michael's mom is... a lot, and telling her could be an ordeal. 

Another obstacle is Michael's crippling addiction to the cartoon The Smurfs. In a very funny early subplot, Michael comes up with absurd reasons to keep from having Kit over to his apartment. This is because Michael has one of the foremost collections of Smurfs memorabilia on the East Coast and he's rightfully concerned that Kit might find this fetish for little blue people off-putting. It's actually a kind of perfect test for their relationship. If Kit can accept Michael at his most Smurf-y, he can accept him for anything. 

The lovely romantic comedy portion of Spoiler Alert lasts longer than you might expect. That's because anyone who has read Michael Ausiello's best seller, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies at the End, knows that Kit develops cancer and the rest of the story is about Michael and Kit repairing their troubled romance just as Kit is dealing with stage four rectal cancer. So many movies don't know what do when the outcome is already so well known, there is a tendency for movies like this to spin their wheels. Spoiler Alert, thankfully, is carried by a wonderful cast and a quirky sense of romance and humor. 

Jim Parsons is working hard to escape the shadow of his beloved TV persona, Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Roles such as this are a very strong step in the right direction. Though similar to Sheldon in that Michael is a big bag of tics and untended neuroses, it's a much less mannered and far more human performance in Spoiler Alert. Parsons is working a lot of actorly muscles that he never trained on his hit sitcom, reaching moments of genuine romance, sexuality, and humor that his television persona was built without. 

That Parsons never misses a beat in Spoiler Alert is a testament to the actorly range we are only now experiencing following his twelve seasons on a hit TV series. His romance with Ben Aldridge's Kit is wonderfully realized. The two men have a strong romantic chemistry that is true to both of their hang ups and anxieties while fostering their connection wit honesty, romance and intimacy. I adored this couple and the ups and downs of their too short romance, cut short by tragedy, are deeply endearing. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media