Classic Movie Review Rosemary's Baby

Rosemary's Baby (1968) 

Directed by Roman Polanski 

Written by Roman Polanski 

Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy

Release Date June 12th, 1968 

Published September 10th, 2017 

Rosemary’s Baby is one of the most sneakily ingenious psycho-dramas ever made. Director Roman Polanski, a quite correctly demonized figure today, was a masterful director in his day. In Rosemary’s Baby, arguably his finest film, Polanski uses film technique and his unique sensibilities to take seemingly normal and mundane things and use our perceptions of those things against us. The most obvious and blatant of these mundane things is using the elderly as the film’s villains, especially the grandmotherly Ruth Gordon.

Rosemary’s Baby is set in New York in 1965. Rosemary is an aspiring housewife to Guy (John Cassavetes), an actor looking for a big break on Broadway while making a living as an actor in commercials. Rosemary and Guy have just landed a beautiful new apartment in a venerated old building with a very creepy history. According to a friend, the building was the home to several disturbing deaths and rumors of occult activities.

This, however, does not put off Rosemary, at least not until she meets the neighbors. Minnie (Gordon) and her husband Roman (Sidney Blackmer) seem like the doting grandparent types by the look of them but when they begin to force their way further and further into the lives of Rosemary and Guy we completely understand why Rosemary feels as uncomfortable as she is. Roman, by some luck, is a producer and when Guy begins spending more time with him his career begins to turn around.

Meanwhile, the couple is trying to get pregnant and here is where Polanski pulls off a really neat and disturbing trick. In what seems as if it could be a dream, Rosemary finds herself slowly beginning to pass out and dream that she is on a yacht with friendly people having a nice time. However, the edges of her dream seem to be tearing away and a bizarre sort of reality is seeping into the fantasy, a dark disturbing reality that finds a nude Rosemary tied to a bed in a room full of nude old people and her freaked out husband. She is then raped by the Devil himself, a cloven hooved demon who climbs on top of her while the old folks chant creepily.

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

Movie Review Mother

Mother (2017) 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky 

Written by Darren Aronofsky 

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer 

Release Date September 15, 2017 

Published September 14th, 2017 

I can’t decide if Mother(!) is Darren Aronofsky’s way of pleasuring himself on screen or if it is a legitimate work of art simply out of the grasp of my pea brain. The film has some seemingly obvious metaphors but they are metaphors that are so blatant that your brain fights the idea that they could be so simple to untangle. At least we can all agree that Mother(!) is a pretentious as all get out work of an egotist artist who’s either far too oblique for his own good or a complete troll.

Mother(!) is the title character played by Jennifer Lawrence who opens the film completely engulfed in flames before waking up in bed. Was it a dream? Stick around, the movie has a little something for you on that later. Mother and her writer husband, played by Javier Bardem, are living in an idyllic old home that has been recovered from a fire. This unique home sits in the middle of a field or perhaps a ‘garden,’ one might call it Eden-like.

The idyll of their country home is upended by the arrival of a snake-like gentleman, played by a skinny, leathery, Ed Harris, who claims to be one of the Husband’s biggest fans. Considering there is no place to stay for miles around they allow the man to spend the night. Then the next day his wife arrives played by Michelle Pfeiffer followed by their warring children played by Domnhall and Brian Gleeson who set about acting out a version of Cane and Abel inside these strangers’ home.

This portion of the film ends with a funeral and a finale in which Mother accuses her husband of not wanting to have sex with her to which he replies with what begins as attempted rape and then becomes a brief sex scene leading to a bizarre reveal and an even more bizarre final act of the film that I will leave you to discover on your own. The portentousness of the reveal is kind of fun and exciting but that pay off was a deal breaker for me, I was pretty much done with Mother(!) at this point and there was still a whole act of full on madness to come.

The lead up to the sex scene in Mother(!) basically states that a woman who is angry or unhappy with her husband to the point where she’s ready to leave him can be satisfied with a good sexing. This, to me, is such a gross and simplistic notion, so remarkably, ludicrously sexist that it seems like a provocation just to get that accusation. Unfortunately, Mother (!) doesn’t offer any rebuttal to this idea. Lawrence’s Mother is ready to leave her husband for not loving her, he attempts to take her by force, she eventually acquiesces because his forcefulness is a turn-on and the movie moves on. There is no attempt to satirize this notion, it is merely presented and that, for me, knocked me out of the movie.

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

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.