Recent Movies

We’ve been watching quite a few movies lately. First was the amazing Hamnet, which I raved about last week, and which I am already looking forward to watching again. None of the others were quite as good, but I enjoyed them all. While we saw Hamnet at the theater, with popcorn, the rest were viewed at home using various streaming services. There was popcorn for one movie, not the rest.

Lonely Planet

Nicole mentioned that she recently watched Lonely Planet, with Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth, and I thought that sounded like a fun idea, so I popped some popcorn and watched it one day while Ted and Maya had other plans.

Laura Dern plays Katherine, a successful writer who is stuck creatively with her current book, and decides that the answer is to go to a writers retreat in Morocco. There she meets Owen, a (much younger) man who is there with his girlfriend, an author who has recently published her first novel to much success. Katherine and Owen find themselves alone together and start a friendship that turns into something more.

I didn’t love it as much as Nicole did. I didn’t like the cheating aspect of it, or that it felt like Owen and his girlfriend got alone fine until suddenly her character had to be rotten so it would be OK for Owen to run off with someone his mother’s age. I think I would have liked it more if I had recently been in the exact places it was filmed, like Nicole, because that is all kinds of awesome. I do like Laura Dern though. People used to tell me that I resembled her, which I kind of do if I were to lose weight and gain height.

Jay Kelly

Saturday we watched Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an actor between gigs who is realizing that he has sacrificed too much in his personal life in order to rise to his level of success. Jay has just wrapped on a film project, and has a couple of weeks off before starting his next. He is looking forward to spending this time with his younger daughter, who is planning to spend her last summer before college in Europe with some friends. Along with this disappointment, Jay finds out that his friend, the director who gave him his first acting job and started his career, has died. At the funeral, he runs into another actor, Tim (Billy Crudup) his roommate from decades earlier before Jay made it. Tim had auditioned for the now dead director all those years ago, and Jay had gone with him, and ended up getting the role. Tim is resentful and feels that Jay is living the life that should have been his, while he is working as a therapist. These events push Jay into following his daughter to Italy, where he is going to accept an honor that he had previously refused. When Jay goes to Italy, his staff has to go as well. His manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), drops everything to go with him, as is expected, as he always does, which Jay does not really appreciate or acknowledge.

I liked this fine. I like George Clooney, I like Billy Crudup, I like Adam Sandler’s more serious roles. I liked seeing Laura Dern again, this time as Jay’s publicist. The actress who played his older daughter was really good. But really, movies about Hollywood and the egos involved are rarely interesting to me. It was pretty well done but mostly felt shallow. I’m guessing it will win awards it doesn’t really deserve because Hollywood loves self referential movies.

Nouvelle Vague

Speaking of love letters to film, we watched Novelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s film imagining the making of Jean Luc Godard’s French New Wave film, Breathless. It’s in black and white, in French with subtitles, and I didn’t know any of the actors. I loved it. At first I felt like I was supposed to know who all of the characters were, but once I let that go it was a lot of fun. I had zero knowledge of Breathless, and am familiar with the term ‘French New Wave’, but had never seen any movies myself. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Breathless

Breathless starts with Michel Poiccard a.k.a. Laszlo Kovacs stealing a car in Marseilles so he can drive to Paris. There’s a girl there he can’t get out of his head, and a guy who owes him money. The girl is Patricia, a New Yorker who wants to be a journalist, currently selling newspapers on the street. Things go wrong on his way to Paris, and the police are in pursuit.

After watching Nouvelle Vague, there was nothing for it but to watch Breathless, which we found on Kanopy, the library movie app. It was fun to compare it to Nouvelle Vague, and see all of the little artistic decisions that they made during filming. This was a charming film full of pseudo intellectualism, like this quote. A famous author is being interviewed by a group of journalists, who are asking him ridiculous questions, when Patricia asks: “What is your greatest ambition in life?” To which the author answers, “To become immortal, and then die.” Excellent.

How about you? Seen any good movies lately?