Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts

Saturday, February 2, 2019

Movie Review ~ Jersey Boys



Due to the polar vortex, (or "cold weather") I took a couple of days off this week. That afforded me some time to catch up on my Netflix bookmarks. I watched two depressing documentaries about the Fyre Festival (two-plus-some hours I'll never get back and a story I found I don't actually give a damn about), and I also watched Jersey Boys, primarily because it was directed by Clint Eastwood, who normally directs awesome movies.

Plus, it was a music flick about artists I am actually familiar with ~ The Four Seasons.

To assign a letter grade to the movie, I would rate it a C minus.

The first act is unnecessarily long. We get to know little Frankie Castelluccio, soon to be "Valli", sixteen and yelled at a lot by his mother for staying out late. Frankie cuts hair by day, his main customer being a Tony Soprano-like mobster played by Christopher Walken. Everyone acknowledges that little Frankie is a wonderful singer, even though his singing voice is catastrophically nasal to the point at which a good allergist might prescribe bed rest and a strong humidifier.

The main character in Act One, however, is Tommy DeVito (or "Chandler Bing"), a small-time hood who nevertheless fronts a musical trio and ultimately brings little Frankie into the group, due to his ability to snort snot onto the female audience members and send them into phlegm-induced convulsions.

This goes on and on, until little Frankie meets a hard-edged woman who talks him into changing his last name, and upon hearing this revelation, he immediately proposes marriage. (Frankie and Hard-Edge ultimately have three daughters, to which he sings inappropriate lullabies about how his eyes adored them, but he never laid a hand on them. Whew!)

The little quartet doesn't gain any traction, though, until DeVito's friend Joe Pesci (yes!) introduces them to a songwriter who has absolutely no cognizance that he's, in fact, gay. But that's neither here nor there in the arc of the story.

New songwriter writes a song called "Sherry" and their flouncy record producer, for whom the group has been singing background vocals, realizes that it's a hit in the making.

This begins a whirlwind of hit recordings and appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show with Topo Gigio.

Act Two introduces us to the anonymous bass player's exasperation at having to share a hotel room with Tommy DeVito, who is a certified slob whose habits ultimately lead to Anonymous Bass Player quitting the band. Plus DeVito (Chandler) is constantly badgering the group's accountant for loans to pay off Tony Soprano's designated loan shark. We're not sure why Tommy needs to borrow money all the time, but he claims it's to "keep the band afloat". Apparently the record company contract is woefully paltry. We're not sure.

Eventually there is a band showdown in Tony Walken Soprano's living room, during which Little Frankie tells Tommy that enough is enough, and DeVito is banished to Las Vegas and reduced to being Joe Pesci's go-fer, while Joe peruses scripts that include the role of a sad-sack "mobster" who terrorizes Macaulaly Culkin.

Little Frankie, altruistically, volunteers to cover all of Tommy's debts. That leads to Act Three, during which Frankie plays bowling alleys and diners, collecting his twenty-dollar wages in all ones. Meanwhile, he hooks up with an unnamed newspaper reporter, who eventually just "can't deal with it" and leaves, stuffing her suitcase full of way too many articles of clothing than a normal person would pack for a weekend getaway.

Eventually, one of Frankie's generic kids dies from some malady and Frankie suffers guilt pangs until closeted gay writer pens him a new hit, which makes everything all right.

Many years later, the Four Seasons (who took their name from a bowling alley ~ not the same one in which Frankie later shilled for dollar bills) are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and meet for the first time in decades outside the hall. Frankie sports a fake "old person" look, as do the other three seasons. No one, however, is leaning on a cane. Each of the Seasons gets their turn to speak directly into the camera, to tell their side of the story, by which point the viewing audience is checking the time on their phones and Googling "good rock movies".

The movie ends by every...single...member of the cast (even the "dead" ones) performing a choreographed dance on a sound stage street. Apparently it was supposed to be an homage to the Broadway show from which the movie was adapted. But it was....weird.

Clint, Clint, Clint...I don't know what you were thinking. Maybe, like I do sometimes, you got so far into the thing that you just kept going and hoped it would all turn out all right.

I bet there's a good movie to be made about this seminal sixties group. This wasn't it.

The thing about the Four Seasons is, they were always there. No, they weren't cool. But there was something about their sound. You couldn't ignore them. Even Frankie's comeback song, which he did as a solo, will live on forever. Me, straddling the era of my big sisters and big brother and ultimately my own, felt like I'd always known them.





Sorry this video sucks, but it's the only original I could find (and good luck finding "Sherry", by the way):


This was not a huge hit, but I like this one:


This was definitely from my era:



In case you were wondering, this was Frankie's comeback song (again, 1967 ~ my era):


In 1975, I was minding my own business, listening to AM radio like I always did, and this song came on. "Is this the Four Seasons? I thought they all died in 1969!"


Speaking of Christopher "Tony Soprano" Walken, Frankie actually gets hit in the Sopranos.


And we never heard from him again.

Just kidding.

The Four Seasons legacy is way stronger than a crappy movie. 

Although I do wonder whatever happened to Chandler Bing.

 


































Saturday, November 24, 2018

Bohemian Rhapsody ~ My Review


If you plan to see a movie, don't read any reviews. Bohemian Rhapsody was almost universally ravaged by the critics, and honestly, because of that, I was not anxious to see it. My stepson recommended it, though, so we went. From the opening scene, I was transfixed. I almost forgot about my popcorn...

A word about critics. My husband and I are not avid moviegoers; we're more the "lie in bed and watch Netflix" types. We tend to see more movies in the fall, when the superhero flicks have been usurped by more serious releases. We caught "First Man" a few weeks ago because it had gotten good reviews (unplanted flag notwithstanding). If you are unaware, "First Man" is about the Apollo moon landing, which one would assume was a glorious achievement. (I was around then, but as a teenager, it wasn't exactly the most exciting moment of my life. My entire family, however, had gathered in front of our console television to watch the grainy pictures of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon's surface, so in deference to my dad, I popped into the living room for a few moments.) When we left the theater after seeing the movie, I felt depressed. The film was, inexplicably, a downer. Even when Neil's wife visited him on the other side of the isolation chamber after he'd returned to earth, she practically chastised him. The couple, if the screenplay is to be believed, had some serious marital issues. Yet most critics gave the film an A+.

My point is, movie critics reek. Yet I fall for it every single time. Before the movie today, we saw a preview for a Steve Carell film in which his character plays with dolls and cries a lot. I bet the critics will laud this one as guaranteed Oscar gold. I turned to my husband and whispered "total flop". This one looks even worse than the last Carell preview we saw only a couple of weeks ago ~ the one where he spends a lot of time praying for his drug-addicted son. Don't get me wrong; I'm not denigrating people with addictions. Lord knows my family is rife with them. But that's not what I go to the multiplex to watch.

So, let me tell you about Bohemian Rhapsody. Rami Malek commands the screen from Scene One. The prosthetic teeth are a bit distracting, but one quickly forgets about them. I had no idea Malek was a brilliant actor. I watched a season and a half of Mr. Robot and pretty much hated it. Rami was clearly wasting his talents.

His portrayal of Freddie Mercury's early career was reminiscent of the swagger of Mick Jagger. Mercury was nothing if not supremely confident. If the screenplay is true (and Brian May was an executive producer, so I'm pretty confident in its accuracy), Freddie was the band member who pushed Queen to soar. He was fearless. He skirted the precipice of danger to create sounds no one had ever dared to conceive. Yet the movie made clear that Queen wasn't solely Mercury. I liked that. Brian May's guitar solo on the Bohemian Rhapsody track is majestic. Freddie clearly understood and respected each band member's unique talents, and knew that Queen was a band...until it wasn't.

Freddie got snookered into believing he could reach higher heights by striking out on his own. A duplicitous hanger-on (played by that nice chauffeur from Downton Abbey) almost destroyed Mercury's life.

The critics' primary condemnation of the film is that Mercury's private life was downplayed. I dissent. We all know Freddie Mercury was gay. Apparently in the critics' eyes, his sexual preference was more important than his creativity and his humanity. Please stop with the virtue signaling.

The fact that Freddie was diagnosed with AIDS is not swept under the rug in the movie. Tears stung my cheeks in the scene where he informed his band mates he had the disease.  

That makes the closing sequence all the more poignant. Queen performs at Live Aid and Freddie knows this is his last...and he kills it.

Rotten Tomatoes:


AUDIENCE SCORE



TOMATOMETER (critics)