Woody Allen’s just spinning his wheels
Wonder Wheel
(out of 4) Starring Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake, Jim Belushi and Juno Temple. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Opens Friday at the Varsity. 101 minutes. 14A Woody Allen claims to ignore reviews, but you have to wonder with an anodyne effort like Wonder Wheel, set in 1950, on New York’s Coney Island. He seeks to please, like a carnival punter hoping for a kewpie doll, but his aim is cockeyed.
Bereft of ideas, the octogenarian writer/director recycles popular older ones, like the May/September romances and gangster subplots of innumerable Allen joints.
And remember the Coney Island preamble from Annie Hall, with Allen’s Alvy Singer giving us the sweet and lowdown of life inside an amusement part? It’s the whole megillah of Wonder Wheel, with Justin Timberlake’s arrogant lifeguard character Mickey subbing for Alvy as he plays the narrator and male protagonist.
Mickey’s a playwright wannabe who vows to one day pen a “profound masterpiece.” In the meantime, he’s happy to bed unhappily married matron Ginny (Kate Winslet), who waits tables in a clam restaurant and who dreams of getting unhooked from her alcoholic fisherman husband Humpty (Jim Belushi).
“Profound masterpiece” isn’t how anybody would describe Allen’s Wonder Wheel screenplay. The dialogue-heavy plot lards in love-triangle complications by way of Humpty’s prodigal daughter Carolina (Juno Temple), who suddenly returns to the fold with Mickey in her adoring eyes and mobsters on her tail. (Perhaps we should call this familiar Allen conceit deus ex machine-gun.)
The look of the film similarly prompts nostalgia for better Allen excursions. Did you love Vittorio Storaro’s “golden hour” lighting from Café Society? It’s back big-time, assaulting the eyeballs as hair and faces explode in a blaze of overexposure that looks more like incompetence than art.
Everything strains to serve an underwritten story that resembles a community theatre stage production more than a major motion picture. None of the characters are remotely credible, with the exception of Winslet’s tragic Ginny, who loves neither wisely nor well.
Allen’s growing indifference to his work can’t stop a pro like Winslet from giving it her all. Her Ginny could be a pathetic figure out of silent-era melodrama but Winslet gives her full voice as a woman raging against the twin terrors of time and disillusionment.
She succeeds in spite of the film, which “just seems to go from one drama to another,” as Mickey observes at one point, pulling his gaze away from his navel for a moment.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, although maybe I did once. Peter Howell Aki Kaurismaki’s Silver Bear winner from Berlinale 2017 continues the refugees-adrift theme of his previous film Le Havre, with the Finnish auteur’s compassion and absurd wit once again abundantly evident.
Syrian stowaway Khaled (Sherwan Haji) arrives in Helsinki covered in coal dust from a cargo ship and shattered by the violence of hometown Aleppo. He seeks asylum and a new life; he’s instead greeted with red tape and rednecks. But he finds solace from another lost soul: shirt seller and poker player Wikstrom (Sakari Kuosmanen), whose gruff manner and eccentric ways can’t hide the gleam of a heart of gold.
Having recently left his alcoholic wife, Wikstrom now aspires to own a restaurant. He acquires one called the Golden Pint, that has Jimi Hendrix on the wall, canned sardines on the table and a staff steeped in Nordic quirk — especially when they try to turn the rests into a sushi place.
Enter Khaled, a stranger in a strange land whom Wikstrom first met when he nearly ran him over with his antique auto. On the run from hatred, Khaled finds brotherhood in the strangest of circumstances. PH Every dejected job seeker fears these five words: “What are you up to?”
In Dim the Fluorescents, underachieving roomies Lillian (Naomi Skwarna) and Audrey (Claire Armstrong) answer the question by pretending to be gainfully employed problem solvers.
They write and perform corporate training demos, mini-plays with titles such as “Leadership in Times of Crisis and Change.” Meanwhile, they can barely manage their own lives.
Playwright Lillian is a Type-A fusspot; aspiring actress Audrey is more A-for-Anxiety loose end. But they treat each corporate gig like it’s a Broadway debut, because it’s the closest thing to art they can find.
The situation is ripe for both hilarity and heartbreak, sometimes at the same time, in this winner of the Best Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance 2017.
The two lead actors, along with Toronto writer/director Daniel Warth and co-writer Miles Barstead, make a virtue out the film’s unsteady tone. They bash reality and role-playing together with brio and some prescience: one of those corporate gigs has to do with workplace sexual harassment. PH Perhaps it’s because horror films have become so blatant and obsessed with graphic gore that filmmaker Adam MacDonald has decided to go the other way with Pyewacket.
But “less is more” doesn’t work so well in this story about a teenage girl, angry with her mother, who unwisely summons an evil spirit to exact revenge and then, of course, comes to regret it.
The film isn’t terrible per se, it just feels underwhelming right up to and including an ending that screams “ho-hum.”
Nicole Munoz plays teenage Leah, who becomes unhinged when her mother decides to sell the family home and move to a quiet place in the woods.
It’s not as though Mom (played by Laurie Holden) is an unreasonable shrew and sure enough, when the spirit begins to make its presence known, Leah is remorseful as heck although, for reasons unknown, she fails to take timely steps to undo the spell.
Munoz doesn’t get much help from a pedestrian script although the wraith-like demon is quite well done. The result is a horror-lite film that barely increases the heart rate. Bruce DeMara Most of us have never heard of Chavela Vargas, a woman of humble origins who became a star in Mexico during the middle part of the last century for her passionate renditions of traditional ranchera songs.
But there’s a great and even inspirational story here and directors Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi have done a masterful job of telling it.
The story opens in1991with Chavela — whom almost everyone had thought was long deceased — giving an interview about her life as a cabaret singer at a time when, amid a macho culture, her non-traditional looks and style would have made her a pariah if not for the fact that she was so damned talented.
Then the story follows her rediscovery, which propels her back into the spotlight — and to better and larger venues — for the remainder of her life, including reflections from many ardent fans, including Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, about her talent and legacy.
For some, Chavela is a lesbian icon, for others a superlative talent. But what a wonderful and worthy tribute to a woman who led such a fascinating life. BD