Yesterday

4 Stars (out of four)

Every once in awhile a movie comes along that can grab my attention like no other and reminds we why I love the movies so much and keep coming back. In my life, at many times, they are all I have. They make me fall in love with the beauty all around us, demonstrating the real power of great stories, of great art. Long ago, in my review for Dazed and Confused, I said great art makes you feel something, it touches you deep in your soul and lifts you above the sum of the experience. This is what it was like for me watching Yesterday.

The plot is cute, but surreal. Jack Malik, a struggling musician (Himesh Patel, in a fantastic film debut), after being injured in a car accident, wakes up to a world which forgot The Beatles ever existed. He then tries to remember each song and performs them as his own and becomes an overnight sensation. But in many of these types of show business movies, all that glitters is not gold. The film has an ulterior motive as well, asking us: What if you got everything in the world you ever wanted or dreamed of, yet you were not happy? It turns out out Jack’s manager, Ellie Appleton (played sweetly and vulnerably by Lily James) loves him and has been his biggest cheerleader and supporter since they were teenagers. Everyone can see they are perfect for each other other than Jack. When she asks why he never loved her just before he leaves for stardom and celebrity, he makes the choice to leave, crushing her, and he realizes, himself. He feels torn because he feels as if he’s a thief and a fraud, and yet wants the world to hear some of the best music ever written.

This movie, at first blush, is a love letter to The Beatles and their music, but there is something much more than that. There is a beautiful, beating heart underneath about chances taken and lost, and the consequences of those decisions. The love story is not trite, but rather the soul of this movie, set to the soundtrack of the Beatles. It is really a story about love; love of family, friends, and yes, music. You don’t have to be a Beatles fan to like the movie, but if you are, it will get to you. I was totally swept away with the story until a surprise cameo totally shattered me and seduced me under its spell. The film is another masterpiece by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Steve Jobs-the good one with Michael Fassbender, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, Trainspotting and Shallow Grave) , who is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors of all time. And while many of his movies are very dark themes, this is a ray of light. A truly great film that resonates not only with the greatness of The Beatles’ music, but also from what one wise man said, “All You Need Is Love.”

What We Do In The Shadows

Three Stars (Out of Four)

What We Do In The Shadows is the story of Viago, Deacon, Vladislav, and Petyr, four flatmates in Queensland, New Zealand trying to work through all the issues that flatmates have: house chores, annoying habits, Learning about Facebook. Oh, and by the way, they are all vampires. We follow a documentary crew as we see their trials and tribulations dealing with the ordinary mundacity of life in the big city.

What We Do In The Shadows was created by the men behind Flight of the Concordes on HBO and follows a similar tone. While they are not following the annoying “too cool for school” approach from their TV show, they approach the subject matter with a very amusing matter-of-fact style. It follows the mockumentary style of This Is Spinal Tap andCrocodile Hunter: Collision Course,  It also takes on the very difficult to pull off meta style of humor. This movie pulled it off brillaintly following acts like: Young Frankenstein, Evil Dead III: Army Of Darkness, Scream, Sean Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Cabin In The Woods, and Tucker And Dale Versus Evil. The true brilliance of this film is how it totally skewers the pomposity of the vampire myth, perpetuated in Dracula, Interview With The Vampire, and the Underworld series. Whenever a story of vampires is told, they are all French or Russian aristocrats. While the HBO show Tru Blood did this a little, making vampires backwoods rednecks, but a lot of the overwrought tropes were there as well. It seems vampires are always young, haughty and rich fops, never normal people.

What I liked particularly about the film is the actual delivery of the humor. While there is a lot of over the top stuff, the funniest jokes are often very subtle digs at all parts of vampire mythology, with a little werewolf and zombie fun thrown in.  Americans seem to have a hard time with this, usually jamming humor down your throat while waving their arms and saying, “Look! We’re being funny!”  Good examples are anything starring Will Ferrell or Steve Carrell or the Madea and Scary Movie franchises. While these can occasionally have good jokes, they tend to be the theater of the overly absurd.  If you are not a fan of the horror genre, particularly vampires, this is not the movie for you. For those of you who love the unneutered vampire films before such dreck aimed at the teenage market like the Twilight series came out, you will love this film. It is a lot of fun.

Mary Poppins Returns

3 Stars (out of four)

I was a little skeptical about this one. Mary Poppins was one of the best movies I have ever seen. It is wholesome, entertaining and holds up after fifty years. It is literally one of the best films ever made. How do you follow that up? Believe it or not, Disney has managed to make a pretty good go at it. Considering that Disney has been on a high horse lately with their live-action remakes with their ridiculous social-justice warrior themes, this is a refreshingly almost modern attitude free story and simply just an entertaining romp.

Basically, the film takes place about twenty years after the original Mary Poppins and follows the Banks children. They are now grown up and they have problems if their own. Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt, in a pretty good imitation of the original Julie Andrews performance) shows up out of the air to take care of the Banks children while money problems are sorted out at the bank. Of course, this means there will will be lovely song and dance numbers with amazingly imaginative and magical set pieces. The standout being when Mary and the children jump into a porcelain bowl. It is reminiscent of the time when Mary, Bert and the children jumped into Bert’s chalk drawings, and like that scene, animation and live-action mixes together in a charming way (or a most delightful one?).

In any case, is the movie any good. The answer is yes. While the songs are not quite as memorable as the original (an admittedly high bar), they are very fun and entertaining, even a bit catchy. While none of them are the masterpieces of the original, Disney went well out of its way to catch the atmosphere and charm of the original. The songs are as timeless sounding as the original with nary a modern twist that would immediately date the original. This also goes with the atmosphere of the entire movie. A very annoying thing about Disney’s new live-action remakes of their old properties has been a ridiculously heavy handed social justice warrior tendency. The wolf pack of The Jungle Book is led by an alpha-female, Belle is a modern, independently minded woman, Malificent is a misunderstood and wronged party, Lafoux is gay, etc, etc, etc. While I have never had a problem with strong female protagonists, the tendency of the Disney movies of today is to insert very modern atttidues to very old stories. This tends to take me out of the story because of the obvious agenda that goes with each movie. Instead, create something new that makes these cases instead of falling on old stories but imprinting 21st century attitudes on 19th century individuals. It is sloppy and lazy writing.

That said, Mary Poppins Returns is a surprisingly wholesome and relatively agenda-free piece of entertainment that thoroughly does what it is supposed to do, entertain. Not preach. The movie is long  on emotions and whimsy, which is just what Mary Poppins should be. The dance numbers are fun, but a tad unmemorable. I very much liked the film, and it was much better than I thought it would be, but it is not particularly a masterpiece. It is a perfectly acceptable and fun film that is great for all ages. I would recommend it for a fun, turn-your-brain-off-and-go piece of entertainment that should be loved by ironic-free minded people of all ages.

They Shall Not Grow Old

Four Stars (out of Four)

November 11, 2018 we celebrated the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of World War I, a war of unfathomable destruction and waste, and sadly, only the opening act to the bloodiest conflict to the worst conflict in human history, World War II.  But for all the ink that World War II gets and how much it gets studied, surprisingly little is known about its bloody forebearer, World War I. And the sad thing is, no one seems to really care as much. Maybe because the motivations of World War II are so much easier to comprehend to several generations who don’t want to think too hard about history and its consequences, maybe because of the confused nature as to how World War I started, or maybe a combination of both, but those who study history realize that World War II was merely a continuation of the issues of World War I. In any case, They Shall Not Grow Old is not meant to be a documentary of the great issues, battles, or even the great truths World War I can teach us. In fact, it is the strangest documentary of its type that I have ever seen. It is the documentary, if that is the right word, of the experience of being a solider in the British Army during World War One. In a fascinating documentary about the documentary at the end of the movie, director Peter Jackson explains he wanted to make a story regarding the experience of the common solider during this most destructive conflict.

In this regard, the movie is surprisingly complete for the typical solider’s story. The movie originally started out as a project from the Imperial War Museum and the BBC to memorialize the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. The Museum had hundreds of hours of film footage and the BBC hundreds of hours of interview material from the 70s and 80s from World War One veterans. The project that was handed to Peter Jackson was to use as much of this material to give the viewer and idea of what World War One was, which, from a historical perspective, is quickly becoming to be like a forgotten war. The film starts from the outbreak of war, to the initial recruitment drives, through the basic training, the wartime experiences, and finally the experiences back home after the war where the country had little use for the veterans and left them alone to deal with the horrors of what they had experienced, today what we would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The movie is astonishingly complete in the mundane and extraordinary experiences the men felt during this time.

But the movie does most historical documentaries one better. Unlike the footage from the countless other documentaries we have seen over the years, Peter Jackson and his crew took great steps to clean and restore the film as much as possible, and most astonishingly, realistically colorize it. Now this isn’t just any thrown together job of colorization that we have seen from movies in the past, this was an astonishing attempt to get the colors and atmosphere so correct that it is as if you were really there.  I was impressed by the History Channel’s superb documentaries, WWII In HD and Vietnam In HD that did basically the same thing, but this movie went the step further. Peter Jackson’s crew corrected the time difference of the hand-cranked 18 frames per second from filmed subjects back then to the correct 24 frames per second we are used to seeing today. When we look at historical footage, it has almost a surreal feel because of this technical problem. By correcting this, Jackson has made the footage even more real. He brought in lip readers so we could hear what the men were saying onscreen. He included foley effects from the real weapons so the film would sound right. He even brought actors from the same areas of England that the units were from so the accents would be right. This insane attention to detail brought a vitality to the men and their emotions that we see onscreen. There is absolutely nothing about this film that does not feel “real” in every sense of the word.

And what a payoff it is. It does a justice to these men who fought, suffered and died under the most hellish of circumstances by focusing on their experiences, their emotions, and ultimately their humanity. In this way, this was the most different documentary I have ever seen because it is a documentary of feelings, not cold facts and dates. It is almost wrong to call it a documentary, because it is a presentation of emotions and experiences, something that is usually subjective, which basically goes against a documentary’s usually mandate. Yet there is nothing untrue here. It is emotion laid bare and raw, worthy of the finest storyteller, and yet it is all real. This is a work of immense achievement, not for its breadth and scope, but for its intimacy of such a large subject. Ultimately, it succeeds so well where other documentaries fail so utterly; it is a true memorial to the men of whom it’s about, a towering feat of a conflict I barely know, and yet fell deep intense feelings for. This movie is phenomenal and should not be missed. Finally, stick around after the credits for a fantastic documentary about the making of the film that is just as good as the film itself.