February 2020

This month, I traveled to San Jose to see three shows: South Bay Musical Theatre’s 2020 Hindsight: Songs I [Stephen Sondheim] Wish I’d Written, She Loves Me and Alan Ayckbourn’s farce Taking Steps. Jay was the narrator/host of the first, and attended the second two with me. All were great fun. Almost as soon as I got home, I flew to Miami to attend the boat show, where a lot of little things went annoyingly wrong. I also subscribed to Newspapers.com and launched an ambitious project archiving old comic strips from the 1960s and 1970s. TV: I finished re-cycling through the old Larry Sanders Show and started re-cycling through the old Taxi series. BOOKS: I continued listening to Close to Home—very nearly done! Here are the movies I watched in February:

RHYTHM SECTION (2020)—Decent enough action/spy flick, wherein members of Blake Lively’s family perish in a transatlantic plane crash, and she ends up spending the whole movie hunting down the people who conspired to bring the airliner down. To call it “muddled” would be an understatement (Joan and I couldn’t really figure out what the antagonists’ motives were), and it’s all totally farfetched, eye-rollingly bogus and laughably ridiculous, the way all “ordinary people become highly skilled assassins overnight” stories are. Even so, the movie keeps the fights and explosions coming at a brisk clip, and despite how implausible it all was, it was relatively entertaining. (7)

BIRDS OF PREY (2020)—I needed to kill a couple of hours in South Florida, and this movie was the perfect vehicle to help me do that. I did not see The Suicide Squad, which introduced the world to Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, but I was told that this stand-alone crime thriller kicked off with a cool animated origin story for our comic-book heroine, and it did. In this movie, mischief-loving Harley teams up with a few other women to help protect a young girl from deranged psychopaths Ewan McGregor and Chris Messina. (Messina seemed so familiar to me during the movie; looking him up afterwards, I was astonished to find that he’d played Danny on The Mindy Project!) The movie is mindlessly entertaining, as is the goofy Betty Boop voice that Robbie provides for Harley. (8)

THE PHOTOGRAPH (2020)—Dull, slow-moving romantic drama about a dead photographer (adorable Chanté Adams) and the romance that develops between her grown daughter (Issa Rae) and a reporter (Lakeith Stanfield) who’s researching a story about her. While I enjoyed watching Adams in her flashback scenes, the movie is only occasionally diverting; mostly it’s about as lively as watching paint dry. Nice, jazzy musical score. (6)

THE LODGE (2020)—Good reviews sparked my curiosity about this horror movie about a dad who takes his financé (Riley Keough) and his two young kids to a snowy lodge. The kids blame their dad’s romance for the death of their mom (Alicia Silverstone, who gets to do one of those splattery shotgun suicide scenes like Vincent D'Onofrio did in Full Metal Jacket). Eventually the tension between the kids and the financé leads to a bizarre confrontation and situation that may or not have supernatural overtones. The “big reveal” was extremely far-fetched and soured the movie for me. (5)

DARK WATERS (2019)—When I was quite young, I asked my father how cigarette companies could be allowed to sell a product that was proven to cause cancer. “Well,” he explained, taking a drag on his Kool filter, “that would put an awful lot of people out of work, wouldn’t it? You can’t just suddenly put so many thousands of people out of a job.” That seemed as crazy an explanation to me then as it did when I was watching this movie, which is based on the very same conceit. Dark Waters is all about how Dupont, which employed many people in West Virginia, was poisoning the water supply as it manufactured the chemical used to make Teflon and dumped the hazardous wastes. The company was in the government’s back pocket, the Environmental Protection Agency turned a blind eye, and people started dying (including Dupont’s own employees). One whistleblower and his attorney (Mark Ruffalo) are scapegoated by the community, many of whom stand to lose their jobs if Dupont is held accountable. Ruffalo spends almost 20 years trying to slay this dragon. This is an Erin Brockovich-type drama about how the little guy stands up to the Mighty Evil Corporation. It’s a compelling but very sad movie. (8)

EMMA (2020)—Pretty slow-moving period piece (at least for the first half to three-quarters). Then, thank God, it finally picked up the pace. Fitfully amusing adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, but the best things about the film are the amazing costumes and Emma’s curly hair style. Anya Taylor-Joy is perfect as Emma. (8)

THE OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS (2020)—As usual, I caught the collection of Oscar-nominated short films, both the live-action and animated featurettes. A real mixed bag this year, with only one truly outstanding live-action short (the gripping kidnapping-themed A Sister) and a couple of great cartoons (Sister, Hair Love). In fact, A Sister may be the best film I see all year.