September 2017

September’s highlights included my trip to San Jose to see the South Bay Musical Theatre production of The Bridges of Madison County; a trip to the doctor to get my hand X-rayed because of some pain in my pinky finger (still no prognosis); and assembling shelves in my bathroom and kitchen. TV: The new season is in full swing; I have cycled Seth MacFarlane’s Star Trek tribute The Orville into my viewing regimen, which already includes Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Good Place, The Mindy Project, South Park, This Is Us, The Simpsons, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Great News. (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Stranger Things and Mom premiere over the next couple of months.) BOOKS: I read Gilly McMillan’s What She Knew and Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. MUSIC: Listened to the cast album recording of The Bridges of Madison County and Shania Twain’s new CD, Now.
Here are the movies I saw in September:

INGRID GOES WEST (2017)—Aubrey Plaza is a troubled soul with an obsessive personality disorder. She has gotten into trouble by stalking a woman in the past, and now she’s desperately trying to befriend an L.A.-based Instagram celebrity. This Single White Female-type saga is alterantely dramatic and hilarious; Plaza is totally believable and often chilling. (9)

IT (2017)—Half of Stephen King’s bloated 1986 horror novel arrives on the big screen after TV’s hit Stranger Things—which strongly recalls the essence of King—has become a major hit on Netflix. (The young actor Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things is on hand to further underscore the similarity of the two stories.) This trimmed-down version of the King story works reasonably well, but the boys drop so many “f-bombs” that it becomes distracting. Reasonably entertaining, but not King’s best plot. (7)

MOTHER! (2017)—Director Darren Aronofsky scored with two disturbing dramas, Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, so hopes were high that this Jennifer Lawrence movie would be another classic. Alas, this home invasion-style thriller gets more and preposterous and surreal as it goes on—it’s a Biblical allegory that didn’t really make a great deal of sense. Loud, garish and pointless. (4)

BRAD’S STATUS (2017)—I like Ben Stiller. His old TV sketch-comedy series was pure genius, and I have also enjoy the occasional movie he stars in (Meet the Parents, There’s Something About Mary). So it’s discouraging that the vast majority of his movies are terrible. How wonderful it is, then, that Brad’s Status is the rare Stiller movie that knocks it out of the ballpark. Stiller is Brad, a fortysomething dad who’s preparing to send his son to college. Their journey to check out a variety of campuses is a thought-provoking odyssey that lays out Brad’s various self-esteem and professional jealousy issues—he’s even envious of his own son. This is a comedy/drama that presses all of the right buttons. Co-stars Michael Sheen, Jenna Fischer and Luke Wilson are used minimally, but they’re very well cast. (9)

BATTLE OF THE SEXES (2017)—This biopic tells the story of the 1973 tennis match between arrogant Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) and Billie Jean King (Emma Stone), and all of the drama leading up to the match. I remember the original saga, but this film does a good job of providing a lot of details I wasn’t familiar with. It’s watchable and reasonably well done, although many of the side characters are one-dimensional—Billie Jean’s manager (Sarah Silverman) is just there to kvetch and smoke cigarettes; Riggs’ crony (Fred Armisen) is just there to feed him pills; and plenty of other characters appear just to do their one single thing. One clip of the real-life Howard Cosell has been electronically manipulated to show him interviewing one of the actors in the film, which was almost worth the price of admission. Lots of TV comedians appear—Silverman, Armisen and Chris Parnell were all former cast members of Saturday Night Live; Wallace Langham was on The Larry Sanders Show; Tom Kenney was on Mr. Show With Bob and David, and so on. Stone, who’s a little too pretty to play Billie Jean, is typically excellent; her lesbian love affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) is the heart and soul of the movie. (8)

CASS TIMBERLANE (1947)—This was my one movie from the vaults this month. An adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel, Spencer Tracy is the title character, a judge, whose affair with a much younger woman (Lana Turner) sends him on an emotionally charged journey. Excellent comedy-drama. (9)