MOVIE REVIEWS
`Little Women'
PG 2:15 ★★★ 1/2
After making a stunning solo directorial debut with her semi-autobiographical 2017 coming-of-age movie “Lady Bird,” two-time Academy Award-nominated auteur Greta Gerwig opted to become the latest filmmaker to bring Louisa May Alcott's often-adapted classic novel “Little Women” to the screen.
And that's reason to celebrate this Christmas season, as Gerwig's adaptation remains faithful to Alcott's semi-autobiographical Civil War-era tale while also imbuing it with new verve and 21st-century relevance.
Beloved by generations of female readers, Alcott's tale of four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in 1860s Massachusetts remains one of the few American literary classics penned by a woman. Published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, it unfurled the lives of the March girls in chronological order, starting with their teen years into their becoming “Little Women.”
Gerwig opts to deconstruct the story and tell it in nonlinear order, a bold move that enlivens the familiar tale. Although the leaps between timelines can cause moments of confusion, the rich development of characters and themes proves more than worth the extra attentiveness the approach demands from the viewer.
“Lady Bird” lead and three-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan reunites with Gerwig to star as Jo March, the second and most willful of the March sisters. A budding writer and tomboyish protofeminist, Jo wants to make her own way in the world and has no intentions of marrying, to the consternation of rich and curmudgeonly spinster Aunt March (threetime Academy Award winner Meryl Streep). Jo's rejection of society's expectations of women lead her to also reject her childhood pal and would-be suitor Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (Oscar nominee and “Lady Bird” co-star Timothée Chalamet), the grandson of the Marches' wealthy neighbor Mr. Laurence (Oscar winner Chris Cooper).
Although she is just as intelligent and capable as Jo, the eldest March daughter, Meg (Emma Watson), has dreams that are more domestic and conventional: She wants a marriage, home and children, but her desire to no longer be burdened with poverty conflicts with her burgeoning affections for Laurie's kindly tutor, John Brooke (James Norton).
A talented pianist and skillful peacemaker, the third March sister, sweet and shy Beth (Eliza Scanlen), has a heart full of charity and compassion, but the organ itself is rather weak. And the youngest and most spoiled of the brood, Amy (Florence Pugh) is a headstrong blond beauty, as well as an ambitious aspiring artist who often clashes with Jo.
A two-time Academy Award nominee, Laura Dern fills the screen with a wonderfully warm and wise presence as the family's steady matriarch, Marmee. The accomplished cast also includes Bob Odenkirk as their gentle father, Robert, who misses part of the girls' childhood serving in the Union Army; Louis Garrel as Friedrich Bhaer, a German professor who critiques Jo's writing and sets out to win her heart; and Tulsa native Tracy Letts as Jo's matter-of-fact publisher, Mr. Dashwood.
Along with the lovely performances, Gerwig's sterling adaptation features fantastic period costumes by Jacqueline Durran, an impeccable score by Alexandre Desplat and gorgeously goldentinged cinematography by Yorick Le Saux, ensuring that the film is just as good for the eyes and ears as it is for the soul.
— Brandy McDonnell, The Oklahoman
`Spies in Disguise'
PG 1:42 ★★★☆
To all appearances, the animated comedy “Spies in Disguise” is just another a rollicking sendup of superspy thrillers. As befits a movie about clandestine activity, however, there's more than meets the eye here. Hidden beneath its parodistic action-comedy exterior is a message, one that doesn't set out to merely lampoon the genre but to playfully question almost everything about it.
“When we fight fire with fire, we all get burned,” says Walter Beckett (voiced by the ever-endearing Tom Holland). Walter is a neurotic gadgets expert tasked with outfitting Lance Sterling (a sufficiently suave Will Smith), the star operative for a U.S. government spy agency known, aptly enough, as the Agency. Within its Washington, D.C., headquarters, built deep beneath the Reflecting Pool, Walter alienates the other members of his tech team by working on contraptions that could only be called ... pacifist. Think adorably distracting glitter bombs, a lavender-scented truth serum and a very serious take on silly string.
He's an eccentric version of MI6's Q, and first-time directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno clearly know their James Bond tropes. Lance checks most of these boxes, with his sleek suit, tricked-out luxury car, quippy persona and comically chiseled jaw line. The slick opening credits sequence, set to the Mark Ronson and Dodgr jam “Freak of Nature,” is straight out of the 007 playbook, as well.
For a world-class spy, however, Bond always has been extraordinarily bad at going unnoticed, and the same could be said for the punch-happy Lance. When Killian (go-to movie bad guy Ben Mendelsohn), a villain with a robotic arm and a grudge, frames Lance for treason, the Agency puts a no-nonsense internal affairs agent (Rashida Jones) and her amusing aides (Karen Gillan and DJ Khaled) on the spy's trail.
Lance subsequently turns to Walter, who has an appropriately insane solution — a serum that transforms our hero into that most inconspicuous of creatures: a pigeon. Lance, who hastily downs the concoction without knowing its purpose, isn't particularly pleased with his new appearance, and the film revels in the absurdity of this human-to-avian body swap. “Spies in Disguise” then turns into a buddy movie as Walter and his now-feathered friend elude capture and thwart Killian's evil plan, which involves a drone-orchestrated assault that must have been dreamed up after a Marvel movie marathon.
The humor includes enough slapstick and gross-out gags to keep the kids entertained, but there are clever callbacks and meta-jokes for older audiences to chuckle at, as well. Although an early “Kill Bill”-tinged sequence romanticizes the pleasures of a good, old-fashioned onscreen scrap, the rest of the shrewd set pieces are about finding “a good way to stop the bad,” as Walter puts it.
Screenwriters Brad Copeland and Lloyd Taylor, who loosely adapted “Spies in Disguise” from the 2009 short film “Pigeon: Impossible,” anchor the story around the refreshingly subversive theme of nonviolence, as the movie finds increasingly inventive ways to visualize Walter's whimsical approach to spycraft.
Before launching its globe-trotting adventure, “Spies in Disguise” finds grounding in a sweetly sentimental prologue in which a young Walter is shown tinkering with devices designed to protect his police officer mother (Rachel Brosnahan). Walter knows his ideas are peculiar, but his mom emphasizes the value of thinking outside the box. “What's wrong with weird?” she asks. “The world needs weird.”
“Spies in Disguise” is also kind of a weird, and that's why it works. Here's hoping more movies take that intel to heart.
— Thomas Floyd, Special To The Washington Post
`Uncut Gems'
R 2:15 ★★★ 1/2
On paper, the character of Howard Ratner, a New York City jeweler of wayward moral and decision-making instincts, does not seem to be the kind of guy with whom most people would want to spend time.
Even on a movie screen — where your exposure to him is limited to a couple of hours or so, and the obnoxiousness of the character is tempered by the undeniable charisma of actor Adam Sandler — “Uncut Gems” is a pressure cooker of a movie. For most of its duration, we're invited to spend time with a wheeler-dealer and compulsive gambler who seems to perpetually be having at least two simultaneous conversations: one kvetching, one horse-trading, and both conducted with the speed of someone under a deadline, and at the volume level normally reserved for sporting events.
It is, ironically, the sporting world that gets things going — and then wrecks them — in the new film directed by siblings Josh and Benny Safdie (“Good Time”), working from a screenplay, co-written by their longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, that's so anxiety-inducing it ought to come with a surgeon general's warning.
As the film opens, Howard is dodging some thugs who are trying to collect a debt he owes his loan shark brotherin-law (Eric Bogosian). Howard's repayment plan isn't simple — nothing in this careening, pinball game of a plot is — but it all revolves around a paperweight-size chunk of rock Howard has just received in the mail from Africa, containing several raw black opals: the uncut gems of the title.
(The film opens in 2010 in an Ethiopian mine, where the Safdies' camera seems to dive inside the stone, on a molecular level, segueing to the inside of Howard's guts as he undergoes a colonoscopy, two years later, back in the States. To what end? It hardly matters, except to signal the wild detours that will be taken by the film's story line. Volatility is a Safdie brothers hallmark.)
Howard plans to sell the rock at auction, where he expects it to fetch $300,000. But before he can do that, he is asked to loan it to basketball player Kevin Garnett, playing himself, who admires it as a goodluck charm and who leaves his Celtics championship ring with Howard as collateral. Maybe the rock is magical — or maybe it is cursed. Who knows? One person it doesn't bring luck to is Howard. Think back to that opening scene in the opal mine: There's a shot of a grievously injured miner.
Long story short: Howard pawns the ring for cash, which he turns around and uses to place a bet on a Celtics game, which — well, just watch the darn thing unfold.
To be sure, “Uncut Gems” is a stressful endeavor. The story, which also involves an angry ex-wife (Idina Menzel) and a mistress (Julia Fox) who ticks Howard off when he catches her messing around with the singer the Weeknd at a nightclub, is full of mishaps, misinterpretations and loud — very loud — arguments. It's entertaining, but not in any traditional, or even nontraditional, sense of the word: “Uncut Gems” is more like watching a bunch of bickering people you're suddenly relieved to discover you don't know personally.
The film's climax takes place inside Howard's claustrophobic shop in the Diamond District, which has glass security doors that have to be buzzed open. On the inside of the locked glass is Howard, and on the outside are people who want to kill him. (In this movie, that could be almost anyone.) The score by Daniel Lopatin, a musician who works under the name Oneohtrix Point Never, amplifies the irritation to the point of angina, with intrusive synthesizer music that sounds like it was lifted, at times, from a video game, and at other times, from an X-rated video, circa 1985.
But Sandler is so good, so committed and so watchable that, despite everything — Howard's irrationality, a rogue's gallery of unpleasant characters, the foreboding of a bad, bad end — you can't take your eyes off the screen, which Sandler seldom vacates.
Sandler himself has — not inaccurately — described Howard as selfish, but the character is also a cockeyed optimist, a dreamer, the quintessential American striver. He's not a hero exactly, except perhaps a tragic one: a man whose gifts and whose flaws are, like 5,000 carats' worth of precious stones stuck in the middle of a worthless rock, inseparable, complicated and beautiful.