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Family values on the big screen
The ties that bind in this week’s new releases: 20th Century Women, The Ardennes, and more
20th Century Women: Annette Bening waits patiently for Lucas Jade Zumann to comment on the juxtaposition of robin's egg-blue oven and avocado woodwork.
Movie
20th Century Women **
Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual <em>consigliere</em> to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters seldom come up for air. Quality-wise, <em>Women</em> lands somewhere between writer-director Mike Mills’s two predecessors, <em>Thumbsucker</em> and <em>Beginners</em>. The equal numbers of flaws (repetition and a reliance on verbs over visual action) and virtues (an at-times mindful discourse handed over by a near-perfect cast) have a tendency of cancelling each other out. Well worth a look if just for the performances, but know going in that director Mills calls upon his cast and script to do most of the heavy lifting. One unhappy exception to that rule: he imposes an occasional switch into <em>Koyaanisqatsi</em> mode to give the illusion of smeary LSD trails. It’s an unnecessary stylish distraction that achieves the (possibly) desired effect of drawing more attention to his sparkling dialogue.
Scott’s big (and mostly positive) review this week is 20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s memory of growing up surrounded by strong feminine figures of all sorts. (Greta Gerwig strikes again!) It’s one more example of family not having to mean Mom, Dad, and their biological children (which may have been a little more unusual back in the ’70s).
The Ardennes, meanwhile, concerns two brothers, one of whom did time for the other, only to find that while he was inside his spared sibling was making time with his best girl. Awkward.
On my end, The Founder is an obvious family pic, seeing as how it’s all about how the McDonald brothers came to lose their name to Ray Kroc. Beyond that, there’s Kroc’s sales-pitch claim that McDonald’s is family, a kind of national dinner table. And his delight in having husband-wife teams set up franchises, even as his own marriage withers.
Movie
Ardennes <em>(D'Ardennen)</em> *
Is there ever a good time to tell your brother that his four years spent in stir — taking the rap for a job you both committed — was just enough time for you and his ex to fall head-over-heels in love? The question that becomes a running gag in Robin Pront’s handsomely-dressed-with-no-place-to-go Flemish noir. Shockingly, volatile ex-con Kenny (Kevin Janssens) can barely hold down the job at the carwash that his guilt-stricken brother Dave (Jeroen Perceval) arranged for him. As if that weren’t enough to justify a feature, Pront pads the running time with those all-too-familiar plot subpoints, pregnancy and drug abuse. Once again, a twist ending plays like a foregone conclusion, as Pront stops at nothing short of melodramatic contrivance and gratuitous brutality to prove just how similar these siblings are. Robrecht Heyvaert’s brooding nighttime cinematography is the film’s one saving grace.
M. Night Shyamalan’s psych-horror Split? That one has family at the heart of both its dramas: a Dissociative Identity Disorder sufferer with a deserter dad and a monster mom plus a resourceful young woman who listened well when Daddy talked about hunting deer (especially bucks).
Movie
Founder ***
John Lee Hancock serves up a biopic of McDonald’s king Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton, just restrained enough as a ravenous dog in a human suit) that is not unlike the restaurant’s product: precisely prepared, brightly packaged (oh, that shot of the golden arches reflected in Kroc’s windshield as he pulls up for the first time), and uncomplicated in its appeal. Or at least, that’s how it goes down much of the time, as it hurtles through the story of how one man took another man’s idea and built an empire before deciding that you can’t really be the burger king while the kingmaker still lives. But then comes the moment where Kroc tells the McDonald brothers (beautifully portrayed as paragons of American decency and ingenuity by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman) that he’s got a greater understanding of what they’ve created than they do. And just like that, the flavors get more complex. The gobsmacked brothers have been comparing Kroc to Hitler, a wolf, and a leech, and there’s no question that as a man, he ain’t much, and maybe less than most. But as a <em>businessman</em>, he’s a blankety-blank marvel, and there’s the rub.
The outlier here is XXX: The Return of Xander Cage, though he probably wouldn’t have it any other way, seeing as how he’s the rebel the world doesn’t know it needs. Family, after all, can get in the way of kicking ass, getting the girl, and looking dope while doing it. However, any movie featuring Vin Diesel and a multicultural team of highly skilled hotties does counts as a family movie under the Fast & Furious provision, which states that family is whoever you say it is. I mean, how can we not talk about family when family is all that we got?
Here's something you might be interested in.
Family values on the big screen
The ties that bind in this week’s new releases: 20th Century Women, The Ardennes, and more
Family values on the big screen
The ties that bind in this week’s new releases: 20th Century Women, The Ardennes, and more
20th Century Women: Annette Bening waits patiently for Lucas Jade Zumann to comment on the juxtaposition of robin's egg-blue oven and avocado woodwork.
Movie
20th Century Women **
Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual <em>consigliere</em> to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters seldom come up for air. Quality-wise, <em>Women</em> lands somewhere between writer-director Mike Mills’s two predecessors, <em>Thumbsucker</em> and <em>Beginners</em>. The equal numbers of flaws (repetition and a reliance on verbs over visual action) and virtues (an at-times mindful discourse handed over by a near-perfect cast) have a tendency of cancelling each other out. Well worth a look if just for the performances, but know going in that director Mills calls upon his cast and script to do most of the heavy lifting. One unhappy exception to that rule: he imposes an occasional switch into <em>Koyaanisqatsi</em> mode to give the illusion of smeary LSD trails. It’s an unnecessary stylish distraction that achieves the (possibly) desired effect of drawing more attention to his sparkling dialogue.
Scott’s big (and mostly positive) review this week is 20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s memory of growing up surrounded by strong feminine figures of all sorts. (Greta Gerwig strikes again!) It’s one more example of family not having to mean Mom, Dad, and their biological children (which may have been a little more unusual back in the ’70s).
The Ardennes, meanwhile, concerns two brothers, one of whom did time for the other, only to find that while he was inside his spared sibling was making time with his best girl. Awkward.
On my end, The Founder is an obvious family pic, seeing as how it’s all about how the McDonald brothers came to lose their name to Ray Kroc. Beyond that, there’s Kroc’s sales-pitch claim that McDonald’s is family, a kind of national dinner table. And his delight in having husband-wife teams set up franchises, even as his own marriage withers.
Movie
Ardennes <em>(D'Ardennen)</em> *
Is there ever a good time to tell your brother that his four years spent in stir — taking the rap for a job you both committed — was just enough time for you and his ex to fall head-over-heels in love? The question that becomes a running gag in Robin Pront’s handsomely-dressed-with-no-place-to-go Flemish noir. Shockingly, volatile ex-con Kenny (Kevin Janssens) can barely hold down the job at the carwash that his guilt-stricken brother Dave (Jeroen Perceval) arranged for him. As if that weren’t enough to justify a feature, Pront pads the running time with those all-too-familiar plot subpoints, pregnancy and drug abuse. Once again, a twist ending plays like a foregone conclusion, as Pront stops at nothing short of melodramatic contrivance and gratuitous brutality to prove just how similar these siblings are. Robrecht Heyvaert’s brooding nighttime cinematography is the film’s one saving grace.
M. Night Shyamalan’s psych-horror Split? That one has family at the heart of both its dramas: a Dissociative Identity Disorder sufferer with a deserter dad and a monster mom plus a resourceful young woman who listened well when Daddy talked about hunting deer (especially bucks).
Movie
Founder ***
John Lee Hancock serves up a biopic of McDonald’s king Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton, just restrained enough as a ravenous dog in a human suit) that is not unlike the restaurant’s product: precisely prepared, brightly packaged (oh, that shot of the golden arches reflected in Kroc’s windshield as he pulls up for the first time), and uncomplicated in its appeal. Or at least, that’s how it goes down much of the time, as it hurtles through the story of how one man took another man’s idea and built an empire before deciding that you can’t really be the burger king while the kingmaker still lives. But then comes the moment where Kroc tells the McDonald brothers (beautifully portrayed as paragons of American decency and ingenuity by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman) that he’s got a greater understanding of what they’ve created than they do. And just like that, the flavors get more complex. The gobsmacked brothers have been comparing Kroc to Hitler, a wolf, and a leech, and there’s no question that as a man, he ain’t much, and maybe less than most. But as a <em>businessman</em>, he’s a blankety-blank marvel, and there’s the rub.
The outlier here is XXX: The Return of Xander Cage, though he probably wouldn’t have it any other way, seeing as how he’s the rebel the world doesn’t know it needs. Family, after all, can get in the way of kicking ass, getting the girl, and looking dope while doing it. However, any movie featuring Vin Diesel and a multicultural team of highly skilled hotties does counts as a family movie under the Fast & Furious provision, which states that family is whoever you say it is. I mean, how can we not talk about family when family is all that we got?
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