For some reason, Hollywood opened about seven quintillion movies on Christmas Day, meaning they were not only in competition with each other for awards-bait dollars but also The Force Awakens, a movie that is going to gross an estimated All The Monies at the box office this holiday season.
With so many new releases hitting theaters and such little time, I thought I’d do a few quick hits with a basic thumbs up/down rubric to guide your weekend viewing.
Joy
There’s a lot going on in Joy, much to its detriment. On the one hand, I admire director and writer David O. Russell’s willingness to let it all out, melding dream sequences with real life and melodrama and flash-forwards and flashbacks. On the other hand, this lack of focus contributes to a narrative messiness that leaves the viewer wondering what, exactly, the movie they just watched was about.
Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is a mother and would-be inventor, a bright young go-getter who has allowed family drama to weigh her down for too long. Her deadbeat ex husband lives in the basement, her mother lives in the guest room, her father is moving in, her kids are sick, her sister is something of a jealous harpy. All of this is vaguely amusing and well acted (Robert De Niro is fine as her father; Edgar Ramirez dopey but strong as the Latin ex-lover) but scattered. Russell did this milieu before, and better, in Silver Linings Playbook.
Far more interesting is the portion of the film that deals with Joy’s development of a self-wringing mop. From the crayon-sketched schematics of the mop to her homemade factory, it’s quite cute. The mop itself is only the beginning, however: getting it into the hands of consumers is another ordeal altogether. And this is where Joy ever so briefly hits its stride, when Joy meets Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), a QVC executive who takes a shot on her and her product.
There’s a story to be told here, a story about the rise of insta-consumerism (what are QVC and shop-at-home cable networks but an early-model Amazon?), a story about the decline of flashy salesmen and the rise of authenticity as a selling point. A story that’s far more interesting than "lady’s family is nuts." But we only get hints of it.
Still. Jennifer Lawrence is something else on screen: buoyant, filled with life, eyes boiling with an intensity rarely seen. I could watch her all day.
Thumbs up.
The Big Short
The Big Short is wildly successful as a piece of filmmaking: a well-acted, creatively scripted effort to take what is typically thought of as an un-cinematic, decidedly non-humorous event—the creation and trading of obscure financial instruments—and make a rather brilliantly funny comedy out of it.
Christian Bale and Steve Carrell and Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt all do good work. The fourth-wall-breaking cameos explaining technical terms for the audience by Margot Robbie (in a bathtub, offering a subtle commentary on The Wolf of Wall Street, perhaps) and Anthony Bourdain, among others, are fantastic. The explanations of CDOs and default swaps are good enough for government work, I guess; I didn’t feel myself scratching my head afterward, but I’m not the person best qualified to judge.
And that’s kind of the problem with The Big Short, a film that will in all likelihood become the go-to reference point regarding the recent financial crisis for a whole generation of middle-to-upper-middle-class folks who wish to be informed on such issues. The Big Short doesn’t really pay attention to the demand side of the housing crisis—we see a stripper with multiple properties she clearly can’t afford who is cast as a victim of lying banker bros, and a poor minority family forced out of the home they rent because their landlord hasn’t paid his mortgage—preferring instead the simple morality tale of evil bankers and finance fraudsters and government goons angling for big-money jobs at the brokerages corrupting a basically good system.
There’s no discussion of the government’s role in inflating the housing bubble, no discussion of the loosening of underwriting standards to ensure that certain classes of consumer were able to buy homes, no discussion of affordable housing mandates.
Perhaps this is a small problem; there’s plenty of blame to go around for the catastrophe of 2008, after all. And maybe the housing market crashed because exotic dancers owned too much property and poor minorities playing by the rules got screwed, and not because normal people bought more than they could afford and the government inflated a huge bubble.
We wouldn’t want to complicate the preferred narrative and soften the cri de coeur that closes the film, imploring us to imprison the greed heads and re-staff the bureaucracy with goodhearted people who will keep the industry in check, now would we?
I’ll sell you the rights to purchase a thumbs up at a price point determined later if you put up a certain amount of collateral now and the market doesn’t collapse.
Point Break
A surefire best picture nominee, this totally necessary remake of a classic action film—
lol jk
No thumbs given because I didn’t see this; shockingly, they didn’t screen it for critics. And if you paid to see it, you’re part of the problem.
Carol
Department store employee and aspiring photographer Therese (Rooney Mara) falls for housewife and Carol (Cate Blanchett) at a time when such things are frowned upon. Indeed, their forbidden love is treated like a mental illness by the state, giving emotionally distant husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) ammunition in his fight to obtain custody of their offspring.
Domestic drama, forbidden passion, lesbian lovers on the run across the country: There’s a lot going on in Carol! Too bad none of it is particularly interesting. Oh, the movie looks beautiful and the shots are carefully composed and the colors are both filled with life and drained of vigor whenever the story calls for them to be so. The film simply did nothing for me.
I’m sure it’ll garner a bunch of Oscar nominations.
Thumb down, shot hazily from a distance as two people furtively discuss their forbidden passion and hide their love from the world that hates and fears them.