May 2018

May was a pleasant month. The issue of Speedboat that I was working on mostly went smoothly. I attended a choir concert in Beverly Hills in which my goddaughter Jenna sang beautifully. I put a down payment on my next cruise, a four-nighter on Carnival set for Dec. 2-6. Joan and I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in downtown L.A., where my comedy idol Emo Philips not only opened, but he also posed for a few selfies with me in the lobby. I joined MoviePass, a deal where you can see a movie every day for just $10 a month. Cindy and I finished our fifth year of tutoring at an elementary school in Santa Monica. One night I made a midnight trip through the local Jack in the Box drive-through, and after ordering, the line seemed to not be moving. Turns out the guy in the car ahead of me actually fell asleep behind the wheel! Finally, I made plans to fly to San Jose in early June to see Jay Steele in the musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where he plays the bad guy. TV: Now that all of my regular broadcast shows have ended their season, I started watching an anthology show called “Inside No. 9,” and continued to enjoy David Letterman’s talk show on Netflix. BOOKS: I finished reading Listen, Please Listen by Naomi Hintze and the audiobook of The Broken Ones by Sarah A. Denzil. I am now about two hours into the new, 18-hour long Stephen King novel The Outsider. 
Here are the movies I saw in May:

DISOBEDIENCE (2018)—I started the month seeing two movies that got excellent reviews on RottenTomatoes, but that were both disappointing in their own ways. Both films also feature standout performances by their two lead actresses. Based on Naomi Alderman’s novel, Disobedience stars Rachel Weisz as a woman reconnecting with her estranged Orthodox Jewish family after her dad dies. That includes her father’s disciple (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife (Rachel McAdams), the latter whom we come to learn had a lesbian fling with Weisz some years ago. It all turns into a bisexual love triangle, with rabbi-to-be Nivola coming to grips with the revelation that the two Rachels may be planning to hit the hay again. There’s too much smoking in the movie for me, and at least two-thirds of the movie crawls along too slowly and is too amateurishly directed for my liking. But there is a good movie in here struggling to get out. I think this would have been a much better movie in the hands of a better director. (6)

TULLY (2018)—There was a random line in this new film written by Diablo Cody (of Juno fame) in which somebody asks, “What was your dog’s name?” And the answer that came into my head was…Tully! Because oddly enough, that was my very first dog’s name. This movie features Charlize Theron as the pregnant wife of Ron Livingston, who already have two kids. In the first 30 minutes or so, we see her struggling with the pregnancy, having the baby, and showing signs of postpartum depression—her son has some kind of behavioral disorder, and she and her husband seem to be growing distant. Then Theron’s brother (always excellent Mark Duplass) insists on hiring her a “night nanny” named Tully, a pretty and fit 27-year-old who alleviates Theron’s struggles in many ways. The middle third of the film, where we see how the au pair infiltrates and benefits this couple’s life, is excellent. Unfortunately, there’s a plot twist in the final third that makes the film “jump the shark” in a truly disastrous way, and the film sinks like a rock. There are also about three too many montages in the movie—I couldn’t figure out why there were so many montages; it seemed a really lazy way to convey that some amount of time and progress was being made. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy seeing super-gorgeous Elaine Tan (playing Duplass’s wife)—they could have just pointed the camera at her for two hours and it would have been a better movie. Having said that, Theron and Mackenzie Davis as Tully are superb. (7)

BOOK CLUB (2018)—With a terrific cast of aging and elderly female actors, including Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, Book Club is like a Nancy Meyers movie, but lacking the wit and finesse of her excellent comedies (It’s Complicated). It’s a lighter-than-air comedy with a fairly entertaining first half; then it just coasts from there. My friend Robert referred to it a “geriatric sex comedy,” and that’s not far from the mark. Several aging male stars make an appearance, including Richard Dreyfuss, Andy Garcia, Craig T. Nelson, Don Johnson, Ed Begley Jr. and Wallace Shawn. None of them embarrass themselves, exactly, but even a couple of weeks after seeing the film, I can barely remember much of it. (6)

ON CHESIL BEACH (2018)—Ian McEwan’s prize-winning novella has been made into a feature film starring Saoirse Ronan (of Brooklyn, Lady Bird and other fine movies). She plays a young newlywed who, on her honeymoon, has some trouble consummating her marriage to Billy Howle. We learn their backstory through numerous flashbacks and there is a post-honeymoon epilogue. This is a movie that takes its sweet time unfolding its story, and without Ronan, it probably wouldn’t be terribly interesting. Fortunately, she is spectacular in it. I will see any movie that she appears in. Note: This was the first movie I saw using my MoviePass membership. (8)