Classic Movie Review Fatal Attraction

Fatal Attraction (1987) 

Directed by Adrian Lyne 

Written by James Dearden 

Starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer 

Release Date September 18th, 1987 

Published September 17th, 2017 

Fatal Attraction stars Michael Douglas as a seemingly happy husband to Ann Archer and father to an adorable 6-year-old daughter. So why, if he’s so happy, does he decide to cheat on his wife? This questions comes to consume the mind of Alex (Glenn Close), the woman Douglas’ Dan decides to sleep with one night while his wife and daughter are away visiting family in the suburbs. Alex can’t understand why Dan would choose to sleep with her and then retreat back to his marriage.

That Alex is also mentally unbalanced does not help matters. Moments after Dan attempts to leave Alex for good and return to his normal upper middle-class life, Alex attempts to kill herself and Dan, not wanting anyone to find out about his fling, decides he needs to stay the night again to make sure Alex doesn’t die and thus potentially reveal his infidelity in the process. This is a decision he will come to regret as saving Alex’s life only furthers her obsession with him.

Will Dan get up the courage to tell his wife what he has done? Will he do it before Alex’s unhinged behavior becomes dangerous to Dan’s entire family? These are the questions of a very minor, very forgettable sub-genre of thrillers. And yet, somehow Fatal Attraction became a massive hit in 1987 and remains part of the cultural zeitgeist 30 years later. Actress Glenn Close as recently as the 25th Anniversary of the film’s release was still being told that she’d terrified men who saw the film.

Why? Why this movie? Why Fatal Attraction? What is it about this sleazy genre thriller that has lasted this long? What is it that keeps this film in our pop culture memory? It baffles me because I have seen knock off after knock off after knock off of the Fatal Attraction formula and none of them are any good. Certainly there is something to be said for being an original but shouldn’t the movie be better than this to last this long?

Fatal Attraction is a cheap, sleazy, silly thriller with over the top performances and capable but not outstanding direction. Adrian Lyne is a director obsessed with sexual politics but he doesn’t have much depth to his obsession. Lyne’s style is to ask big questions but not give the questions much weight beyond the plot in progress. The big question of Fatal Attraction is ‘What would you do if you were Dan?’ That’s not a very interesting question. Everything that happens to Dan is his own fault and while Lyne seems to want us to sympathize with him as Alex goes on the attack, it’s almost comical how unsympathetic Dan is.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community at Vocal. 

Movie Review The Wilde Wedding

The Wilde Wedding (2017)

Directed by Damian Harris 

Written by Damian Harris 

Starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Patrick Stewart, Minnie Driver, Jack Davenport 

Release Date September 15th, 2017 

Published September 13th, 2017 

The Wilde Wedding has the chance to be a pretty great movie but lacks the courage to pull it off. The film brings together the talents of Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Patrick Stewart for a wedding comedy and the charm factor would be off the charts except that writer-director Damian Harris can’t resist mucking up the works by having the younger cast too often crowd out the more interesting veterans.

The Wilde Wedding casts Glenn Close as world famous movie star Eve Wilde. Eve is on the verge of her 4th marriage; this time to a novelist named Harold Alcott (Stewart) who could not be less suited for her. We meet Harold as he is arriving for the weekend wedding with his two daughters and a friend and appears to be cramming for a test on Eve’s IMDB page. He can’t seem to remember the names of Eve’s most famous movies and seems to be of the belief that if he can’t remember them he won’t be able to get married.

Joining the wedding party is Laurence, Eve’s first ex-husband played by Malkovich. Pompous but charming, it was Laurence who’d gotten Eve her first role in Hollywood, one that very quickly eclipsed his own Hollywood start and eventually led to trouble in their marriage. Laurence and Eve have three sons, played by Noah Emmerich, Rob Langeder and Peter Fascinelli who are each given one trait to portray based off the simplistic notions of the emotional trauma of having been children of divorce.

They are joined by various girlfriends, assistants, friends or children, all very limited in their screen time and none of much particular interest. Minnie Driver plays one of the son’s rock star ex-wife who sings a pretty terrible cover of Billy Idol’s White Wedding as a supposed wedding gift while Grace Van Patten is the requisite millennial who is on hand to film everything for a documentary as her gift to her grandmother. Van Patten is saddled with an attraction to her cousin whom she insists is a first cousin once removed because that’s somehow less creepy or necessary to the story?

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review The Pick Up Artist

The Pick Up Artist (1987) 

Directed by James Toback

Written by James Toback 

Starring Molly Ringwald, Robert Downey Jr. 

Release Date September 18th, 1987 

Published September 19th, 2017 

The Pick Up Artist is a bizarrely bad movie of the kind only James Toback seems capable of. This mess of a romantic comedy and a gangster movie attempts to be both conventional and unconventional. Toback’s thing has always been arthouse style talky existentialism with a healthy dose of New York. Watching him try to cram that unusual sensibility into a mainstream movie would be unwatchable were it not for Robert Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald who, at the very least, remain likable even as they struggle against a director lost in his attempt to serve the commercial and the arty.

Jack Jericho is a pick up artist. He practices his terrible pick up lines in his bathroom mirror before he leaves to run the streets like a dog chasing every squirrel in his field of vision. That Jack plies his trade in the morning before he goes to work as a grade school gym teacher, odd, inexplicable choice of profession aside, makes his aims seem strange from the very beginning. Is Jack looking for dates or sex or both? Writer-Director Toback doesn’t seem to know or very much care.

The comedy for Toback is in Jack’s failing, silly attempts at meeting women. He seems fascinated by Downey chatting up chicks and dedicates much of the first portion of the movie to just listening to Jack try and stay in front of the various women he accosts on the street. In fact, the movie pretty much derails from the very beginning because Toback is more interested in the pick up lines and Downey’s charm than he is in setting up the ludicrous gangster story that is shoehorned into this 82 minute movie.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream (2000) 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Written by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Ellen Burstyn 

Release Date October 6th, 2000 

Published October 2017 

With Darren Aronofsky's latest film Mother starring Jennifer Lawrence arriving in theaters across the country this week, now is the perfect time to look back on the best of Aronofsky's career thus far. You can hear more about Mother and the style of Darren Aronofsky on the next "Everyone Is a Critic Movie Review Podcast" available on iTunes every Monday Morning.

Darren Aronofsky is driven by an obsession with obsession. His characters are those that are driven past the brink of madness by their obsessions. The math in Pi, the drugs in Requiem for a Dream, love and immortality in The Fountain, to be the best in Black Swan, Piety and to build a boat in Noah, Aronofsky’s characters are obsessives who risk everything for their goals no matter how dangerous or wrong-headed those goals may be.

In Requiem for a Dream obsession is the underlying element of addiction. Addiction drives those obsessed with their ideas of what they believe will make them happy. For Harry (Jared Leto), what he believes will make him happy is settling down with Marion (Jennifer Connelly), opening a business, maybe starting a family all the while continuing to shoot heroin. His obsession is the goal of being happy while also remaining on heroin; a poignantly sad goal he doesn’t realize is entirely at odds.

Marion meanwhile, shares some of Harry’s obsession with happiness but is far more defined by her desire to be different from her rich parents. Throughout the film, Marion makes only minor references to her parents but each is a revelation about her character. Early on, Marion mentions that money is not what she wants from her parents but rather for them to show concern for her that doesn’t involve finance. As she goes deeper into her addiction however, it becomes clear that her parents’ inattention isn’t as much the problem as is her desire to be different from them, that which drives her further toward degradation and addiction.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Home Again

Home Again (2017) 

Directed by Hallie Meyers Shyer 

Written by Hallie Meyers Shyer 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, Pico Alexander, Lake Bell, Michael Sheen, Candace Bergen

Release Date August 29th, 2017

Published August 28th, 2017

Home Again is a vacuous and inane movie that is otherwise an inoffensive and forgettable romantic comedy about characters who have no problems. It’s the kind of vacuousness that you would think even Hollywood would be tired of by now and yet there still seems to be an appetite for it. I think it’s called lifestyle porn, wherein the poor watch movies like Home Again and fantasize about the architecture and accoutrements without a care for whether or not the characters’ lives are worth enduring.

Home Again makes for fine lifestyle porn if not an actual movie. It’s all very pretty and pretty empty. The film stars Reese Witherspoon as the mother of two daughters who has just fled her marriage to a rock promoter in New York, played by Michael Sheen, for her late father’s home in Los Angeles. Her life is upended like a bad CW show when she has a near one night stand with a much younger man who her kooky mom (Candace Bergen) invites to live in her guest house along with his two pals.

The three guys are Harry (Pico Alexander), Teddy (Nat Wolff), and George (Jon Rudnitsky), three aspiring filmmakers. Harry is the impossibly handsome… director? Yeah, the super-handsome guy is the one who plays the director. I’m not saying directors can’t be handsome, but it was a curious choice in the casting here to take the relatively unknown but super-handsome Pico Alexander and cast him as the artistic visionary and have the much more well known and slightly less handsome Nat Wolff play the movie star.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review It Chapter 1

Stephen King's It (2017)

Directed by Andy Muschietti 

Written by Chase Parker, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman

Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis 

Release Date September 8th, 2017

September 7th, 2017 

To say that the 2017 take on Stephen King’s Magnum Clown Opus IT is better than the 1990 mini-series is an understatement. The mini-series was a punishing nearly four-hour mix of a pretty good kids’ story and a nearly impossible to watch adult story. Jettisoning the adult story in favor of focusing on the far superior kids’ story from King’s novel, the 2017 IT crafts a tightly wound, creepy horror flick that plays on some serious issues about grief and abuse while delivering the kind of machine tooled jump scares that modern audiences go to the movies for.

IT stars Jordan Lieberher as Bill, the ringleader of a group of friends who are often picked on and lean on each other for support. Bill’s friends include Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), and Stanley (Wyatt Oleff). Along through, the story the core group adds Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a chubby kid who is new in town, Mikey (Chosen Jacobs), a home-schooled farm kid, and Beverly (Sophia Lillis), a young beauty who has an unwarranted reputation around the small town of Derry, Maine.

The story kicks off in 1988 when Bill’s little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) goes outside to play in the rain and goes missing at the hands of the evil clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard). In a scene that is actually quite shocking for modern horror film, Georgie’s disappearance sets a tone of fear and dread that director Andy Muschietti, a first-time feature director, does a tremendous job of maintaining over the course of the film’s two hour and fifteen-minute running time. The scene is legit frightening and Pennywise "The Dancing Clown” could not get a better or creepier introduction.

Naturally, the story from there is our group of young heroes battling Pennywise and trying to stay alive, but much like Stephen King’s book, director Muschietti and screenwriters Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, who was going to direct the film before dropping out, do an exceptional job of introducing each of the kids’ obstacles and fears. While these scenes played like filler in the 1990 mini-series, because it’s TV and there are things you can’t do on TV, the movie is filled with genuine horrors and traumas these kids must overcome and that Pennywise uses to great advantage.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Rememory

Rememory (2017) 

Directed by Mark Palansky 

Written by Mark Palansky, Michael Vudakinovich 

Starring Peter Dinklage, Julia Ormond, Anton Yelchin, Henry Ian Cusick 

Release Date August 24th, 2017 

Published August 22nd, 2017 

Rememory wants desperately to be a deep meditation on memory, grief and loss, and a sci-fi mystery. The film achieves some of that goal thanks to the performances from the stellar cast headed by Peter Dinklage and Julia Ormond. That said, the deep meditation part only skims the surface and the sci-fi mystery movie is achieved only through the use of a Deus Xx Machina, a magic memory machine.

Rememory stars Game of Thrones MVP Peter Dinklage as a deeply wounded man coping with the death of his brother in an accident that opens the film. Cut to several years later as Dinklage's Sam Bloom is sitting in the audience of a lecture being given by an acquaintance named Gordon Dunn (Martin Donovan). Dunn has created a remarkable piece of technology that can extract full length memories from human beings.

The nature of this technology is kept mostly under wraps as it is merely the simplistic set-up for a sci-fi detective story wherein Gordon dies under suspicious circumstances and Sam, because he seems to have no job, or family, or life of any kind, dedicates himself to finding Gordon’s killer. What luck then that he can scam Gordon’s grieving widow Carolyn (Julia Ormond) into giving him the chance to steal Gordon’s magic memory machine from his office.

The other side of that story is that Ben hopes to use the machine to recover his memory of the night his brother died in order to collect his brother’s dying words and uncover their meaning, or so he thinks. Meanwhile, Ben’s investigation leads him to three possible suspects, Gordon’s business partner, Robert (Henry Ian Cusick), Gordon’s mistress and patient Wendy (Evelyne Brochu), and Todd (the late Anton Yelchin to whom the film is dedicated), another of Gordon’s patients and the mystery man who visited Gordon on the night he died.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.