I think I'm more comfortable with being disappointed.

Last Chance Harvey

(2008)

Aging, lonely and shunned Dustin Hoffman kindles a romance with 22 years younger but still aging and lonely Emma Thompson in this well-meaning but very slight story from writer-director Joel Hopkins. You couldn’t really call it a romantic comedy as it isn’t very funny, but it does have a number of musical montage sequences which suggests that it thinks it may belong to that genre.

Thompson’s vocal performance suffers from posh actress doing a working class accent syndrome (see also Rachel Weisz in Fred Claus) but both she and Hoffman are winning even where the script fails them. In the end it’s down to them that you want to buy into the possibility of them as couple; certainly, no admonitions that this “doesn’t happen in real life” encourage you to believe that, yes, it does in this movie instance.

Diminutive Dustin spends the first 30 minutes of the film as a fairly unsympathetic figure; it’s the gradual stacking of odds against him that encourages identification, and his interaction with his daughter and ex-wife and her new husband (the latter two played by Kathy Baker and Josh Brolin’s dad James – the only actor I know of to have played Pee Wee Herman besides Pee Wee Herman himself)

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We live in a twilight world.

Tenet (2020)
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Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

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Juno and the Paycock (1930)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds. Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

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Zootropolis (2016)
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Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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