A Quiet Passion – The Movie Gourmet

Movies to See Right Now

May 19, 2017 by movie gourmet

Recommended movies to see in theaters this week:

The gentle and insightful end-of-life drama Truman. Often funny, it’s a weeper that is never maudlin. One of the best movies of the year. Hard to find, but worth it.
The droll dark comedy Radio Dreams explores the ambivalence of the immigrant experience through the portrait of a flamboyant misfit, a man who rides the roller coaster of megalomania and despair. Radio Dreams opens today for a one-week-only run at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.
The Lost City of Z, a thoughtful and beautifully cinematic revival of the adventure epic genre.
In Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, writer-director Joseph Cedar and his star Richard Gere combine to create the unforgettable character of Norman Oppenheimer, a Jewish Willy Loman who finally gets his chance to sits with the Movers and Shakers. This may be Gere’s best movie performance ever.
The Dinner is an emotional potboiler that showcases Richard Gere, Laura Linney Steve Coogan and Rebecca Hall.
Free Fire is a witty and fun shoot ’em up.
Their Finest is an appealing, middling period drama set during the London Blitz.

And movies to avoid:

A Quiet Passion, a miserably evocative portrait of a miserable Emily Dickinson.
I found the predictable Armenian Genocide drama The Promise to be a colossal waste of Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale.

My DVD/Stream of the week is the historical Feel Good Hidden Figures, which tells the hitherto generally unknown story of some African-American women whose math wizardry was key to the success of the US space program in the early 1960s. The audience at my screening burst into applause, which doesn’t happen that often. Hidden Figures is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

On May 23, Turner Classic Movies will air two great, great, great Westerns: John Ford’s classic The Searchers with John Wayne and a much less famous film, Sydney Pollack’s under recognized 1972 masterpiece Jeremiah Johnson, which features a brilliantly understated but compelling performance by Robert Redford. If you want to understand why Redford is a movie star, watch this movie. Give lots of credit to Pollack – it’s only 108 minutes long, and today’s filmmakers would bloat this epic tale by 40 minutes longer.

Then on May 25, there is a real curiosity on TCM, the 1933 anti-war movie Men Must Fight, which predicts many aspects World War II with unsettling accuracy. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a trip.

Also on May 25, TCM brings us another two movies from my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters – The Killer Shrews and The Wasp Woman.

Movies to See Right Now

May 12, 2017 by movie gourmet

Richard Gere in NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER

Recommended movies to see in theaters this week:

The gentle and insightful end-of-life drama Truman. Often funny, it’s a weeper that is never maudlin. One of the best movies of the year. Hard to find, but worth it.
The Lost City of Z, a thoughtful and beautifully cinematic revival of the adventure epic genre.
In Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, writer-director Joseph Cedar and his star Richard Gere combine to create the unforgettable character of Norman Oppenheimer, a Jewish Willy Loman who finally gets his chance to sits with the Movers and Shakers. This may be Gere’s best movie performance ever.
The Dinner is an emotional potboiler that showcases Richard Gere, Laura Linney Steve Coogan and Rebecca Hall.
Free Fire is a witty and fun shoot ’em up.
Their Finest is an appealing, middling period drama set during the London Blitz.

And movies to avoid:

A Quiet Passion, a miserably evocative portrait of a miserable Emily Dickinson.
I found the predictable Armenian Genocide drama The Promise to be a colossal waste of Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the emotionally affecting drama Lion, one of the top crowd pleasers of 2016. When The Wife and I saw Lion, pretty much the entire audience was choked up. Stay all the way through the end credits for even more tears. Lion is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

What’s coming up this week on Turner Classic Movies? To start with, tonight TCM broadcasts the iconic generational comedy The Graduate AND my choice for the funniest movie of all time, The Producers.

On May 15, TCM will air the film that launched the Coen Brothers (Ethan and Joel), their first feature Blood Simple. Since their debut, the Coens have gone on to win Oscars for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and their True Grit and the very, very underrated A Serious Man are just as good. Along the way, they also gave us the unforgettable The Big Lebowski.

It all started with their highly original neo-noir Blood Simple. It’s dark, it’s funny and damned entertaining. The highlight is the singular performance by veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh as a Stetson-topped gunsel. Blood Simple was also the breakthrough performance for Frances McDormand. The suspenseful finale, when Walsh is methodically hunting down McDormand, is brilliant.

A QUIET PASSION: she was unhappy and so are we

May 10, 2017 by movie gourmet

Cynthia Nixon plays the 19th Century American poet Emily Dickinson in the biopic A Quiet Passion. Even though the Dickinson family was free-thinking for its era, Protestant New England society was severe as the women’s hairstyle. As I watched these characters navigate their world, the words “forbidding” and “stern” kept coming to mind. It was an age where the groom kisses his new bride on the cheek, and a euphoric outburst is “Reverend Wadsworth’s sermon took my breath away.”

That’s a bad time and place to be innovative or iconoclastic. And a horrible time for a woman to seek recognition for her art. The Quiet Passion’s Emily Dickinson is in a constant state of social rebellion and always unappreciated as a poet.

She clearly appreciates the sexism of the era and is enraged by the injustice. She sees through the unnecessary constrictions of the religiosity of the day and is disgusted. Unfortunately, she also holds everyone to impossible standards. She suffers emotionally, and then begins to suffer physically. All of this makes her very unpleasant and difficult to live with.

Cynthia Nixon is a fine actress and vividly conveys Dickinson’s unhappiness. Nixon, of course, is known for playing Miranda, by far the most interesting character in Sex in the City. Nixon gets to showcase her wit when Dickinson and her sister (Jennifer Ehle) repress laughter during a hilariously awkward tea with Reverend Wadsworth and his abstemious and anti-social wife.

All of the cast in A Quiet Passion is good, with the exception of the hammy Duncan Duff, who plays Dickinson’s brother, who apparently was known for tightening his brow and popping his eyes. Catherine Bailey gets to sparkle as she pops off the wicked bon mots of Dickinson’s super ironic friend Vryling Buffam.

The British director Terence Davies is a critical favorite, and generously employs arty touches like static shots of long duration and the subjective view. But I have never warmed to his films.

Davies often follows scenes from Dickinson’s life with a voice over of a Dickinson poem on the same subject. So Dickinson’s poetry comments on Dickinson’s life. The problem is that The Quiet Passion is a daisy chain of unlinked anecdotes. For a linear story, the whole thing is distractingly disjointed.

The Quiet Passion is a dreary and ponderous film. I was actually rooting for Emily to die so the movie would be over.