I’ve been sick for three days–it’s no surprise, really, given that I’d been running ragged for months and was feeling no small amount of heartbreak–but I felt compelled to rally when HuffPost Live asked me to do a roundup of best and worst films of 2015 with the great Michael Musto and Decider.com’s Olivia Armstrong. Try to ignore the high phlegm content rumbling in my voice.
Archive | Film Matters
Holiday Movies: The B Sides
Lord knows tried-and-true holiday standards like “A Christmas Tale” can grow tiring (though I still recommend watching “Elf” on auto-repeat from now until New Year’s Day). But there are some films that fly under the radar this time of year because they’re either interestingly flawed or dark–two qualities I embrace in yueltide films, not shockingly.
“A Christmas Tale” (2008)
This may be Arnaud Desplechin’s best film, which is saying quite a lot given that he’s one of the best European directors working today. It is also one of the most overlooked holiday films of all time – perhaps because it’s even darker than “It’s a Wonderful Life.” About a fractured – and fractious! – clan reassembled for Christmas to find a bone marrow match for their leukemia-stricken matriarch (Catherine Deneuve), it stars such European greats as Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, and Chiara Mastroianni (Deneuve’s daughter, a star in her own right) as a bevy of hyper-entwined siblings, cousins, and lovers. As jumbled as it is gorgeous, this is an erotic and neurotic paean to love lost and found that remains deeply skeptical of blood bonds even as it celebrates the “ties that bind.”
“Christmas in Connecticut” (1945)
Unlike some of the films on this list, there’s a good reason why this Yule-time farce has been overlooked: Its plot is paper-thin. But it stars no less than Barbara Stanwyck, that grand dame of 1940s screwballs, and that’s motivation alone to blow the dust off the film canister (metaphorically speaking). She plays a “Diary of a Housewife” newspaper columnist whose holiday supper for an ailing war hero (Dennis Morgan) is compromised by the fact that she secretly doesn’t have a domestic bone in her body. Not only is “The Queen” in rare form but the cuisine porn – and mid-century fashion – is gloriously rendered. The hats alone will make you swoon. (For more overlooked Christmastime Stanwyck, also check out “Remember the Night,” in which she stars with Fred MacMurray in a sly-eyed holiday noir written by Preston Sturges.) Continue Reading →
The Snow Globe of ‘Joy’
“Joy,” David O. Russell’s latest, is not an adaptation, though it would have benefited from being one. Based on the story of Joy Mangano, the real-life woman who invented the Miracle Mop and became a major entrepreneur on the QVC network, it is co-written by Annie Mumolo and Russell, who has said that he believes “strong women are the key to great cinema.” Certainly he puts his money where his mouth is. Even in his male-centric films like “The Fighter,” strong women run the show. But Mangano’s can-do spirit is somewhat muted by this muddle of a melodrama, which swings tonally between a Pedro Almodóvar-inflected telenovella, a 1990s update of “You Can’t Take It With You,” and a Preston Sturges comedy on a cutting-room floor. An antecedent memoir might have provided much-needed signposts.
Jennifer Lawrence plays Mangano, which goes a long way toward cutting through the fog. Not since Julia Roberts has Hollywood found itself such a bright light, and Lawrence comes with the added benefit of being a strong actress who, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, has already shed any fear of un-likeability; she seems to take more cues from 1940s screwball dames than her less self-possessed contemporaries. As Mangano, she channels the weary brassiness of a woman who’s been soldiering her family’s burdens since before she was an adult. She even speaks in the clipped tones of a Barbara Stanwyck or Irene Dunne. (No vocal fry for this millennial.) Continue Reading →