Time for another round of rapid-fire movie reviews as I scramble to catch up on everything flooding the theaters and Netflix for the winter. We're gonna cover a slew of genres and a slew of opinions, so get ready!
Jay Kelly: Directed by Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the screenplay with Emily Mortimer (who has a small role in the movie as well), this is a movie about an actor named Jay Kelly (played with classic Cary Grant charisma by George Clooney) who has had an enormously successful career but burned many bridges along the way with friends, family, and colleagues. He decides to go on an impromptu trip to Europe, ostensibly to receive a lifetime achievement-style tribute in Italy, but really to see if he can spend more time with his daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is travelling with her friends and has no interest in spending time with her absentee father. On this trip, he takes his entourage, including long-suffering manager Ron (Adam Sandler), who is constantly juggling his demanding clients with his demanding family, and publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), who is entirely too stressed out to be dealing with her client.
What follows is a lot of nostalgia and flashbacks to pivotal moments in young Jay's career, the important people who came in and out of his life, and the various ways in which he always chose his work over anything else. There's some pretty scenery, and Clooney does some lovely movie-star acting, managing to convey his sadness and resignation over his choices. But overall, the movie just feels like a big ball of nothing, a rumination on stardom that has nothing particularly revelatory to convey. I suppose it's a perfectly adequate "stream on the couch" movie, but there's not much else going on here.
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, this is a weird and trippy movie about a therapist named Linda (played magnificently by Rose Byrne) who is really struggling. She has a very sick daughter who must be fed through a feeding tube and needs constant care and supervision; her husband is a ship captain and away on an eight-week work trip; the ceiling in her apartment has collapsed so she and her daughter need to move to a shabby motel while repairs take place; she has increasingly needy and difficult patients to deal with at work; and her sessions with her own therapist (played wonderfully by Conan O'Brien) are getting increasingly adversarial.
As you can imagine, this is a very tense movie, and the psychological discomfort keeps ratcheting up as Linda's life continues to spiral out of control. It's essentially a horror film about being a woman who has to do it all with very little support, and who is being challenged in every possible sphere of her life. Byrne's performance is nail-bitingly excellent, but this is not a movie that I would ever want to watch again. Give it one essential viewing and then tune into a sitcom to cleanse the palate.
Fackham Hall: Directed by Jim O'Hanlon and written by the Dawson Bros., Jimmy Carr, and Patrick Carr, this is an extremely silly and very British movie. It is a satire of self-serious prestige British dramas like Downton Abbey or Gosford Park, so get ready for a lot of puns and absurdity in the style of
The Naked Gun movies. Set in 1930s England, the film follows the Davenport family who live in the grand estate of Fackham Hall but do not have a male heir who could inherit it. The eldest daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), is all set to marry her cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), as incest is a core family tenet to keep the bloodlines pure, but when that wedding is thwarted, hopes are set on the dreamy and idealistic younger daughter, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) to save the family. Of course, Rose has fallen in love with a young servant named Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), so that's going to complicate matters.
Further complicating matters is the murder of her father (played by Damian Lewis), so then we get a classic murder mystery spoof, with Tom Goodman-Hill playing Inspector Watt (yes, we get a whole sequence of people being very confused as to WHAT his name is...Watt?). This movie is dumb but diverting, a perfectly pleasant way to while away 90 minutes when you have some time to kill or you just want to let your brain relax for a bit. If you love silly British comedy, this is exactly what you seek, but if you've never watched a British show in your life, this is not the movie for you.
Ella McCay: Written and directed by James L. Brooks, this is a deeply strange movie that features an all-star cast delivering amazing performances in service of a terrible script. Emma Mackey stars as the titular Ella, a 34-year-old woman who unexpectedly becomes the Governor of her state and is a passionate and principled politician. Unfortunately, she has a lot of challenging men in her life. Her estranged father (Woody Harrelson) is back in town and demanding forgiveness, she is increasingly worried about her anxious and agoraphobic brother (Spike Fearn) who isn't answering her messages, her husband (Jack Lowden) wants a bigger role at her side in government, and her old boss (Albert Brooks) is constantly nagging her about how she needs to be more charismatic and less idealistic if she wants to succeed as a politician. The only supportive people in her life are her bodyguard and driver (Kumail Nanjiani), her protective secretary (Julie Kavner, who is also the narrator of the movie, probably just because she has the most distinctive voice known to mankind?), and her Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is the only functional family member she has had in her life, and who fiercely loves and champions her.
This movie is a hot mess - there are a lot of storylines, and it proceeds like a bunch of vignettes (perhaps hearkening to Brooks' success in writing and directing sitcoms), and the dialogue is astonishingly clunky. The actors are fantastic, particularly Mackey and Curtis who work beautifully off each other, and I can't wait to see Mackey be a superstar in other movies, but this movie is not it. Honestly, I would not have minded this movie as much if it wasn't for one particular storyline involving Ella's brother and his ex-girlfriend, played by Ayo Edebiri. As the only Black character in this film, it was particularly galling to see what this movie made her go through, and I was NOT here for it. I agreed with almost all of the moral values of this film, and the good people got to have a happy ending while the bad people got their just desserts. But boy oh boy does it get it very wrong with the brother. Don't bother suffering through this movie in a theater, but please do watch it on streaming and let me know what you thought. I still can't quite understand what point it was ever hoping to make.
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