Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Marry Me (PG-13)

J. Lo plays a pop star who makes the pop decision to marry a rando at her concert in Marry Me, a series of music videos with rom-com-ery squished in between and I am fine with that.

Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez) is a pop megastar engaged to fellow pop megastar Bastian (Maluma). After performing their hit song “Marry Me” at a lavishly costumed Kat Valdez concert, the two plan to get married on stage in front of the sold-out audience of concert-goers and millions more online. But during the costume change between the ballad and the ceremony, a story about Bastian cheating on Kat goes viral and Kat sees the report of his infidelities just as a riser brings her up on stage in her dazzling wedding dress, one of many awesome “ooo, nice!” outfits sported by Lopez and others in this movie.

Shocked, heartbroken and already killing it in a great dress, Kat Valdez decides she might as well marry somebody and says “yes, I’ll marry you” to a random guy in the audience holding a “Marry Me” sign: math teacher Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson).

Charlie knows basically nothing about Kat or Bastian or their music or what really is going on. He accepted teacher buddy Parker’s (Bedford’s own Sarah Silverman) invitation to the concert mostly because he thought it would improve his coolness standing with his daughter Lou (Chloe Coleman), who recently started attending Charlie’s school and had been bragging about how fun her mom’s new husband is. He was only holding the sign so that Parker could take a selfie. In the moment he is maybe a little bit dazzled by Kat, a little bit sympathetic to the idea of somebody going through a difficult situation and a little bit just stunned. When she pulls him on stage to marry her, he just sorta goes with it. Later, when her manager, Collin (John Bradley), asks him to basically date Kat for a while so they both look less crazy, Charlie agrees to it in part because she agrees to fundraise for his math team and in part because he genuinely wants to get to know her better.

We seem to have entered some phase in the culture where, at least for certain feel-good rom-com properties, nobody is that bad. Even Bastian isn’t a horrible villain. Nobody has to degrade anybody, nobody has to be an active jerk. We don’t have to see our heroine humiliated, we don’t have to like our hero in spite of anything. I’m liking this kindness and maturity approach to romance. It makes for a more pleasant viewing experience and it makes a whole lot more sense (wacky setup aside) with these characters who are “north of 35” as someone describes Kat at one point which, like, sure, they’re that, but those actors are also in their young 50s and it would probably be OK if the movie described them that way too.

But, baby steps, I can be happy with people having grown-up responses to things.

As mentioned, large parts of Marry Me do feel like their primary purpose is to get me to buy the Marry Me soundtrack, with songs by Jennifer Lopez and Maluma, which I’m strongly tempted to do because it’s solid pop music, frequently with Latin flair. Lopez is, of course, great at this and at blending the pop-star-performance part with the rom-com-heroine part of this role. Wilson’s role largely just requires him to not get in the way and occasionally be quietly funny — and he performs these functions absolutely fine, even if he doesn’t bring much in the way of his own sparkle to the proceedings.

Marry Me feels very traditional in its story beats and its characters but with just enough tweaks to keep it from feeling fusty and to make the entire experience more chocolate cake than stale candy bar. “Extremely pleasant and surprisingly enjoyable” doesn’t feel like a rave you’ll see on any movie posters but it does feel like a welcome addition to rom-com offerings. B

Rated PG-13. Directed by Kat Coiro with a screenplay by John Rogers & Tami Sagher and Harper Dill (based on the graphic novel by Bobby Crosby), Marry Me is an hour and 52 minutes long and distributed by Universal Pictures in theaters and via Peacock.

Death on the Nile (PG-13)

Kenneth Branagh mustaches back up as detective Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile, another Agatha Christie adaptation that seems like a really elaborate live-action role-play game of Clue.

Branagh, for the record, is the only one winning at this particular game night. Well, Branagh and all the “below the line” costume, set design, hair and makeup types, who seem like they are also having a ball.

After a flashback to young Poirot that feels like vaguely interesting but irrelevant filler, we see Poirot in 1937 London, where he visits a nightclub that just happens to have a slew of people who will be important to the plot later. We see Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) and her fiance, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer, bringing a whole layer to this movie that was almost certainly not intended at the time of shooting back in 2019), sexy dancing to the music of blues singer Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okonedo), who is managed by her niece, Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright). Then Jacqueline’s (and, as we learn at some point, Rosalie’s) old friend Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) arrives. Linnet is exceptionally wealthy and famous and looks like Gal Gadot. Simon, who had just been all but making out with Jacqueline on the dance floor, is instantly smitten with her.

Months later Poirot is vacationing in Egypt when he runs in to his old friend Bouc (Tom Bateman), who is also vacationing in Egypt with his mother, Euphemia (Annette Bening). As it turns out, they aren’t just there on a spontaneous holiday; they are also part of a larger party celebrating the recent wedding of Simon and Linnet. The group includes Linnet’s assistant Louise (Rose Leslie), her financial manager Katchardourian (Ali Fazal), her ex-boyfriend Dr. Windlesham (Russell Brand) and her godmother, Marie Van Schuyler (Jennifer Saunders), who has her own assistant, Bowers (Dawn French).

Also part of the group are the Otterbournes — because Salome was singing the night they met, the new couple brings them along.

Decidedly not invited is Jacqueline, who nevertheless seems to be following the group, insisting that Simon still loves her. Her behavior is so unhinged that Linnet decides to rent a boat so her group can be in its own controlled bubble. But naturally a locked room can still result in a murder and it is soon up to Poirot to catch “ze killah.”

Actually, in fairness, I don’t think he ever says exactly that; it’s more like “dhe mer-der-ehr” but it’s a whole to-do every time he says it. Poirot saying murderer or murder or killer is probably 60 percent of what works in this movie.

I didn’t hate this movie as much as some of the headlines for reviews I’ve been trying to avoid seemed to suggest I’d hate it. But that’s probably about the best I can say for it. This movie takes its pretty people and puts them in a pretty (if stagey) locale but it can’t bring much in the way of liveliness to that scenario. If anything, this movie highlights the flatness that Gal Gadot sometimes brings to her performances and the soap opera smarm of Armie Hammer (which kind of works here but maybe shouldn’t for this to actually be a mystery). Yes, Branagh seems to be having fun with his Agatha Christie cosplay, but he’s almost off in his own movie, having emotional beats where everybody else’s performance is at least 92 percent costume and hairstyle.

As a take on the locked room mystery, I could see a version of this movie with a sort of goofy puzzleness (and some fewer number of characters and shorter runtime) that would be above-average entertaining. I’m not saying genuinely funny in the Knives Out sense or campy like the old Clue movie; more like a kind of National Treasure meets Pirates of the Caribbean level of goofiness where everything feels like an amusement park ride version of a set and the characters aren’t afraid to go hammy. Here, Branagh hits those notes but everybody else is just too thin to add up to much more than backdrop for his Poirot.

Looking back at my review for Murder on the Orient Express, I think I disliked this movie less than that one, which might say more about me and my openness to any level of movie spectacle than it does about achievement of this particular movie. It isn’t a failure, but it is set up to only succeed as light popcorn adventure and on that level it just doesn’t offer the fun and chills that it needs to. C+

Rated PG-13 for violence, some bloody images, and sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Kenneth Branagh with a screenplay by Michael Green (based on the book by Agatha Christie), Death on the Nile is two hours and seven minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Twentieth Century Studios

Featured photo: Marry Me.

Welcome to the new class of Oscar nominees! The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced on Feb. 8 and this year there are 10 contenders for best picture (the Oscar winners will be announced on March 27). If you’re still looking to catch up on the films of 2021, the list of nominees is an excellent place to start. Here are the best picture nominees and where to find them:

• Belfast (PG-13) Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this semi-autobiographical tale of a boyhood amid the unrest of Northern Ireland in the 1960s. It is available for rent at home and it is still in theaters, including Red River Theatres in Concord, where it returns starting Friday, Feb. 11.
• CODA (PG-13) This excellent story about a teen who discovers her singing talent and her changing relationship with her parents might be my favorite of this group. It is available on Apple TV+.
• Don’t Look Up (R) Adam McKay directed and wrote the screenplay for this satire, which you can find on Netflix, that stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.
• Drive My Car (NR) This Japanese film also nabbed a Best International Film nomination as well as nominations in other categories and is the one movie of this group I haven’t seen yet. It is currently in theaters in the Boston area.
• Dune (PG-13) Not surprisingly, this beautiful-to-look-at adaptation also nabbed several nominations for the look and sound of the film. It is currently available for rent or purchase and will return to HBO Max on March 10.
• King Richard (PG-13) Will Smith also got a Best Actor in a Lead Role nod for this movie about Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. The movie is available for purchase.
• Licorice Pizza (R) For me, the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s was this real star of this Paul Thomas Anderson story about a precocious 15-year-old and the twentysomething girl he falls for. The movie is currently in theaters.
• Nightmare Alley (R) This movie from director Guillermo del Toro was another one that wowed me more for its aesthetics. It is currently playing in theaters in the Boston area and available via HBO Max.
• The Power of the Dog (R) This Jane Campion-directed movie nabbed a slew of nominations, including nods in three acting categories and for Campion in the director category (making her the only woman nominated in that category this year). Find it on Netflix.
• West Side Story (PG-13) Steven Spielberg’s very good adaptation of the musical got Ariana DeBose a much deserved nomination in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category for Anita, among its many nominations. It is currently in theaters.

Moonfall (PG-13)

The moon is suddenly headed toward collision or something with Earth in Moonfall, a movie that is both even dumber than that sounds and yet somehow not nearly as dumb as it needs to be.

Lean in to your dumbness, you dumb dumb movie — was my feeling throughout.

Astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) is kicked out of NASA after an incident in space results in the death of one of his crew members. His public downfall also leads to his getting divorced, being estranged from his kid, going broke and even cutting contact with his former close coworker Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry), who was on the doomed mission but was knocked unconscious and can’t back up his story that the incident was caused not by human error but by a Space Thing.

What kind of Space Thing, you ask? Well, the thing that causes the destruction to Brian’s mission looks like a floaty cloud made of pencil lead bits and ball bearings. He last sees it in the vicinity of the moon and then — then nothing. He’s drummed out of NASA and labeled a nutcase and nobody ever mentions the Thing again for like a decade until the events of this movie start with NASA scientists figuring out that the moon’s orbit has changed. Jocinda is now number two at NASA and wants the team to figure out what’s up with the moon and why it seems to be suddenly getting closer to Earth, which will eventually cause chunks of the moon to ram into Earth. Also she’d like everybody to keep quiet about it for a bit.

What she doesn’t know is that at the same time, amateur astronomer/professional pastrami sandwich maker KC Houseman (John Bradley), long the holder of some really wild theories about the moon, has also figured out that it has changed its orbit and is heading toward Earth. He tweets it out and suddenly the world is in chaos at our impending destruction while NASA and the military work on competing ideas for preventing the disaster.

Naturally, KC, Brian and Jocinda eventually come together to tackle the moon crisis. All three have family situations that lead to harrowing near-misses in “meanwhile” scenes — or at least they would if we ever really got to know anybody’s kids and moms or if any of them behaved in recognizably human ways, which they don’t.

I have so many questions about the making of this movie. I want to know the total backstory, soup to nuttiness — starting with how did Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley end up in this movie together? My theory: somebody challenged Roland Emmerich (this movie’s director and co-writer) to make a movie starring whoever happened to be the guests on, say, Jimmy Fallon one night. Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and guy from Game of Thrones feels like a solid late night show lineup; please don’t ever tell me if I’m wrong about this because I like this theory and anything else would just make me feel sad for these actors.

You know that expression “building the plane while we’re flying it”? This movie feels like it was thought up as it went along with holes for dialogue and plot to be filled in later — but “later” never came. Like, Emmerich was standing over one of his co-writers saying “come on, just print out the script for this scene” and the writer was saying, “But it’s not finished. The dialogue doesn’t sound like normal human speech and we don’t really understand what motivates anybody’s characters or what their relationships to each other are” and Emmerich says “So what? We’ll just make the moon bigger and say some nonsense about gravity, no one will notice” and that’s how every scene came to be. (Though I could also see some kind of Mad Libs situation being at play.)

I won’t spoil the exact nature of the moon as presented here, mostly because it’s stupid, but I will say that it wasn’t what I was sort of rooting for, which was giant space egg holding some kind of about-to-hatch space lizard. Or chicken, space chicken would also be fun. It is much more muddled than that, with some interesting ideas but nothing ever well-developed enough to be even as “just go with it” fun as, like, The Day After Tomorrow and its whole ice age thing or 2012 and its worldwide flood. Again, you suspect the writers were writing page three while they were printing page two and the cast was shooting page one — with no chance to go back and fill in details or massage story points to flow more smoothly.

And yet, none of this would have necessarily mattered if the movie had really leaned into how dumb it is and let the characters be as ridiculous as the situation. Remember the various people who died in ridiculous ways in Independence Day? Or Woody Harrelson as the wild-eyed volcano guy in 2012? This movie needs some of that energy. Of the core group, only Bradley really seems to understand the exact speed to be at. Berry (who was great in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and knows how to be awesome in nonsense) and Wilson feel as though they’re in different movies — different from the movie they’re in and possibly different from each other. Everybody in this movie needs to be thinking “what would Geostorm-era Gerard Butler do” and then do that, but bigger and louder.

I fully expected and wanted Moonfall to be really dumb. I’m completely uninterested in gritty, realistic apocalypse movies right now. I want space chickens to hatch from the moon or whatever and I want the saving of all of humanity to come down to three randos in some patched together old space shuttle. So crank the volume on that silliness all the way up, movie. At the current muted and muddled level, Moonfall is just the kind of dumb you wonder why you even bothered to watch, not the kind of dumb you want to watch again and again. C-

Rated PG-13 for violence, disaster, strong language and some drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Roland Emmerich with a screenplay by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, Moonfall is two hours and 10 minutes long and distributed by Lionsgate in theaters.

Featured photo: Moonfall.

Parallel Mothers (R)

Writer and director Pedro Almodóvar tells a story of mothers and daughters, secrets and reckoning with the past in the Spanish-language movie Parallel Mothers.

I mean, OK, he does that in most of the movies of his that I’ve seen — Pain and Glory felt like a striking departure because it was about a mother and son — but Almodóvar knows how to build fascinating relationships between imperfect women.

Here we see Janis (Penélope Cruz) and Ana (Milena Smit), sharing a hospital room, as they are about to give birth to their babies. Both are single. Janis is a settled professional woman nearing 40; Ana is a teenager (how old exactly I’m not sure — high school or young college). Janis is grateful for this unexpected pregnancy, the result of an enjoyable (but concluded, maybe) affair. Even before we hear the details, it’s clear that there is some trauma attached to Ana’s pregnancy. Both women have their babies — Janis’ daughter Cecilia and Ana’s daughter Anita — and both have some emotional support in their corner: Janis has her longtime friend Elena (Rossy de Palma) and Ana has Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), the mother with whom she’s had a difficult relationship. At least, Ana has her mother’s financial support; a stage actress, Teresa lands a career-defining role and has to go on tour early in Ana’s new mom-hood.

Janis is managing with help from her housekeeper and, eventually, a good daycare, thanks to some photography work thrown her way by Elena. But she hits an unexpected emotional bump when Arturo (Israel Elejalde), baby Cecilia’s father, comes to see them. Though she ended their relationship — he’s married and wasn’t too keen on her keeping the baby — she is disappointed when he leaves moments after seeing Cecilia. Later he tells her he didn’t feel a kind of instant recognition for the baby, which sets Janis’ mind going in all sorts of directions, perhaps connected to the fact that she didn’t know her own father and was raised by her grandmother.

While Janis and Ana deal with their present-day motherhood, a story unfolds in the background connected to how Janis and Arturo first met. Arturo is an archaeologist whose work includes looking into the remains of those executed during the Spanish Civil War. Janis and the village she is from are looking to get help excavating an unmarked grave that they believe holds 10 men, including Janis’ great-grandfather. When Janis works a photo shoot for Arturo, she asks him if he will help the village work on the excavations — with the great-grandchildren and grandchildren and even at least one living child of the men eager to see them properly laid to rest.

It’s odd to have a melodramatic — to the point of soapiness — tale of Janis and Arturo and Ana layered over the top of this more searing historical tale of wrongs and the attempts to bring some sort of justice or at least recognition of what happened. There is a clear throughline — about having to acknowledge wrongs, despite the personal sacrifices, and make attempts to make amends. But it’s still jarring, at times.

That said, this is, as always, a well-crafted, thoroughly engrossing tale of women and their relationships to each other, of mothers and their difficult (but fiercely loving) relationships with their daughters, of coming to terms with sorrow and heartache and moving forward. Almodóvar does such a great job of getting to the raw emotion of these tangles — and of getting an emotionally raw performance from Cruz — that it overcomes what occasionally feel like dips into “too much”-ness, storywise. B+

Rated R for some sexuality, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Parallel Mothers is two hours and three minutes long and distributed by Sony in theaters.

Featured photo: Parellel Mothers.