Sondheim Forum

I watched "The Punisher" tonight.  Apparently the concept was to punish the audience.  I thought it was never going to end.  Was it that bad back in 2004? It couldn't make up it's mind if it was a funny action movie or a serious, violent flick.  

I've never seen the Punisher movie and don't have a strong urge to rectify that (though I seem to be one of the few people who liked the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie, which was from the same period). Doesn't Marvel have a Punisher series on Netflix now? Maybe it's an attempt to correct this mistake, sort of the same way their Daredevil series is correcting the Ben Affleck "mistake."

I don't really care for the character of The Punisher at all.  I guess the only time he kinda worked for me was in limited use in Frank Miller's great run on Daredevil (back when Miller was good).  But he's had a number of screen appearances--all pretty much quickly forgotten until now with Netflix where I gather he was so popular on Daredevil Season 1 that they did decide to give him a show (I'm behind on the Netflix/Marvel shows, but I don't think it's premiered yet).

(OK, I checked--it premiers in two weeks).

Dolph Lundgren starred in a 1989 version which had him up against the Yakuza because... why not?  It wasn't, apparently, much like the comics, really... 

I believe fans liked the 2004 version quite a bit, overall, but... I've never seen it.

I'm pretty sure The Punisher doesn't appear until Daredevil Season Two (which I haven't watched, because I really wasn't that enamored with Season One).

I came across this listicle (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/05/30-singular-films-watch-quarantine/611956/) yesterday and ended up enjoying its eighth item, a feature-length, crowd-financed 2011 dance film (and valentine to NYC) that is guaranteed to lift your mood:

https://www.girlwalkallday.com

Ryan Murphy's Boys In The Band remake, with Joe Mantello directing his 2018 Broadway-revival cast, may or may not deserve its own thread.  But Netflix recently announced a release date (https://www.playbill.com/article/the-boys-in-the-band-netflix-adaptation-with-jim-parsons-zachary-quinto-andrew-rannells-matt-bomer-more-sets-september-release) of September 30, a little over a month from now.  Also check out the first-look pics, with the cast in their groovy 60s duds -- and the nifty French doors and spiral stairs in "Michael"'s (Jim Parsons) West Village duplex.

Continuing the Murphy theme, I just watched The Prom on Netflix and am 99% positive this thread could have been invented for it.  By turns cloyingly slick and weirdly maladroit, and a case study in Murphy's patented tonal schizophrenia, there's probably at least as much about it to hate as to love -- and, in between, oceans of just-neutral competence and professionalism, which I admire right up to the point where its onslaught becomes merely numbing.

But I'm a sap -- blame the holiday season, or maybe the year: though not a great movie, (I can't compare it to the show, which I missed), it actually had me tearing up more than once.

Laughs were in shorter supply: I recall exactly one spontaneous guffaw, and I can't even remember exactly what occasioned it, though I seem to recall it as something apparently ad-libbed by either Streep or Kidman, rather than a scripted (nor, in all likelihood, directed) moment.  Still, the cast appeared to be having a fine time despite all the strenuous hoops the story puts them through, and that energy is overall pretty infectious.

A mixed bag, in other words.  It may be emblematic of my reaction to the movie as a whole that I still can't decide whether The Prom's 2:20 running time is brazenly self-indulgent (you very much feel that length, it doesn't "fly by") or refreshingly unbothered by movie conventions which arbitrarily stipulate that material this slight mustn't run a second over 90 minutes.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/09/james-corden-the-prom-netflix-proves-straight-actors-playing-gay-should-think-twice

This put me off entirely

While undeniably the weak link -- Corden is a modestly-talented performer with no apparent transformational range -- I'm baffled by The Guardian's (among others', it seems) outrage.  Have they not noticed that "lisping and mincing" are a long-established mainstay of Corden's persona, with zero disrespect implied -- indeed, quite the reverse -- toward gay people or gay culture?  While I agree that Nathan Lane would've been much better in the role (and have no difficulty believing that Brooks Ashmanskas definitively owns it), Corden acquits himself decently despite being a bit too young and a bit too cuddly; while his interpretation might not be ideal, it fits just fine into the Gleescape Murphy has (for better or worse) made of this material, and is not at all the distracting misstep -- not to say the abomination -- suggested by this article.  It's not a great performance, but it's a perfectly competent one; if, at the end of 2020, this is what's getting one's knickers in a twist...  :-\

At risk of heresy, I actually questioned the casting (or perhaps Murphy's direction?) of the story's nominal lead, fresh-faced Jo Ellen Pellman (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/movies/jo-ellen-pellman-prom-lgbtq.html), more than that of Corden.  Pellman comes across here as a sweet, innocuously appealing performer -- perhaps too much the still (I'm tempted to say vacant) center around which all The Prom's zaniness orbits -- and her lovely smile is deployed far too liberally, making nonsense of the inciting predicament as she floats through school grinning dreamily while singing about how crushed her soul is by the trauma of growing up gay in a small-minded Midwestern town.  I suspect the role might benefit from hints of grit and perhaps even saltiness that I can't tell whether the affable Pellman has in her repertoire (though she may possess them in spades off-camera).

This looks really interesting (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_night_in_soho/reviews?type=top_critics):

That was a VERY good trailer!  (except, for me, the last few seconds.  I wish they had kept the same tone the rest of the trailer had.  Those few seconds took an what looked to be an interesting, elevated thriller and brought it back down mere horror.  But that's just my opinion of the trailer and I'd still like to see the movie. My disappointment probably stems more from how impressed I was with the trailer up until that point.)

Yeah, I actually had a similar reaction: for me, the teaser's final shot (https://images.app.goo.gl/eUguoTLctx5k3ur16) -- with the mirror-crack graphic running through Thomasin McKenzie's face, frozen mid-grimace -- was the slightly off-putting capper, pushing its tone oddly somewhere into the general neighborhood of giallo (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/434808539029566032/) sadism.  (Granted, in retrospect it's not as though the lurid Technicolor palette of the nighttime shots, not to mention the naive-girl(s)-in-the-city (and in jeopardy) setup and the literally-dripping neon intertitles, left us radically unprepared for such a shift, but for some reason it still jars a bit).

On the other hand, though, now that I think of it: the time-travel fantasy with its double edge, nostalgic and cautionary; the mirror imagery; the tone-shifting "trapped-in-the-wrong-genre" denouement -- and even, come to think of it, that final cracked-face gambit -- all contribute to the odd (but, to me, more interesting and appealing) Follies-ish vibe I had been getting prior to the teaser's decisive shift into horror.  Or perhaps more The Girls Upstairs, with its past-and-present hauntings circling around a "who'll-do-it" murder mystery.

Sondheim, Goldman and Prince were of course experimenting with their form, most daringly in Follies's final sequence, yoking genre tropes (in its case, those of pre-WWII Broadway spectacle rather than horror) to subversive thematic ends.  Alas, some of Last Night In Soho's critics report that its last act is essentially all-too-accurately represented by the teaser's: the interesting ideas Wright has been developing in the first two-thirds of the movie end up, they say, devolving thereafter into rote slasher-horror cliché.

Still, I want to find time to see this.  It does look visually stunning.  I'm not much of a Halloween person, but I suppose this movie might count as sort of seasonally-appropriate fare.  (And while I love me some Jamie Lee Curtis, this definitely looks more interesting than Halloween Kills).

"Full" trailer:


Though not a whole lot longer than the "teaser trailer" posted above -- both run around two and a half minutes -- this one favors plot (of which it crams in quite a bit) over atmosphere, giving the movie a slightly more conventional gloss and sacrificing some mystery in the process.  (Broadly speaking, I guess that tends to be the difference between initial "teasers" -- hence their name -- and subsequent "trailers").

Doesn't matter; I'm still hooked.  I'm planning to see this with a friend this coming weekend.

Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Oct 31, 2021, 10:55 AMthe interesting ideas Wright has been developing in the first two-thirds of the movie end up, according to these critics, devolving thereafter into rote slasher-horror cliché.

This is exactly what I don't like about the end of the trailer.  What they show after they cut the music should have been cut from the trailer.  In other words, it should have been a shorter teaser.

So much for this movie not deserving its own thread.


Ms. Taylor-Joy can actually be heard performing "Downtown" in downtempo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnA0YKPVnlk) (see above), uptempo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrEmMWl-t9I) (karaoke perfection), and a cappella (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp3WOfzXzlM) versions,  plus "You're My World" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJzD7fN0y8), on the soundtrack (https://www.newsweek.com/last-night-soho-soundtrack-list-1644491).

Archipel (https://denverfilmfestival.eventive.org/films/6151f24ab4a86d00c0ab7005) was a strange movie. I'm not sure what it was about because it was so abstract. If you watch the trailer on the link, you've pretty much got a sense of the entire movie. I want to say I didn't understand it because it was in French, but I don't think I would have understood it if it were in English--except I would have understood what some of the floating animated words meant, which may not have turned out to make any difference.

That is a neat trailer and I really like the style of animation.  Having said that, I don't know if I could sit through 72 minutes without my mind drifting off.  That is a movie I would be glad I saw but might not fully appreciate.

The King's Man was a very violent, very action-packed war movie. I am not a fan of war movies. I'm trying to think of even one that I like, and can't even come up with a classic one. It was nice to see Ralph Fiennes kicking major ass, but this is not my type of movie, and I can't genuinely recommend it.

I haven't yet seen this documentary (http://automatmovie.com) about Horn & Hardart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart), titled simply The Automat.  It sounds highly entertaining, but, judging by Wesley Morris's nuanced review, it also sounds like a trove of minor misjudgments and missed opportunities:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/movies/the-automat-review.html

Morris makes this seem possibly like an instance where, given such an irresistible subject -- surely this doc would have sold itself, with or without Mel Brooks's (perhaps overenthusiastic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vrDw1vmWo8)) participation -- no one felt the need to explore it with enough depth or rigor to fully mine its riches.

Which, if true, would be unfortunate: judging by his description alone, I could easily imagine seeing it and pining for the much better documentary that might have been.  But in fairness, director Lisa Hurwitz (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/movies/automat-movie-interview.html)'s interest in the subject seems not only genuine (the film took her a decade to make) but probing; The New Yorker's Richard Brody, for one, is less measured in his appreciation (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-automat-is-a-guide-to-the-wonders-of-mid-twentieth-century-urbanism) than Morris.

And even if the filmmaker's and her interview subjects' heads were more softened by nostalgia than one might wish, it's not hard to see why.  It really is a pretty dang surefire-irresistible topic -- even or perhaps especially for those of us who were born too late to experience the automat in its heyday (or at all), which includes most people these days, not least of all Hurwitz herself.  (Indeed, the topic's nostalgia-appeal dates back at least as far as 1979 (https://books.google.com/books?id=utYCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA44&dq=Automat&hl=en&sa=X&ei=z_OXUYW2AquF0QHk-YGYAw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Automat&f=false), and probably much farther: according to Wikipedia, H&H had by then already been in significant decline for well over a decade).  I might or might not rush out to see this on the big screen, but I'll definitely catch it as soon as it comes to streaming.

And mark my words: if it hasn't already been tried or isn't already in progress, sooner than later there will surely be some fictionalized treatment of the  subject, employing the automat as the central literary, filmic or dramatic "hook" for some ambitious, multi-stranded narrative exploration of (to borrow Brody's phrase) mid-20th-century urbanism: the business history behind the restaurant's innovation and expansion, sure, but also the stories of everyday customers and workers whose near-absence from Hurwitz's documentary gives Morris such (understandable) pause.  Plenty, for sure, of "the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience" cited by Brody.  And, almost certainly, an elegy for a nearly-vanished urban ideal, laced with questions about how, and whether, the American cultural "melting pot" actually works.  From reading even just the small handful of articles that I've linked in this post, it seems to me there's a series (or film or novel or musical) crying out to be made; I'd be surprised if there weren't writers and producers somewhere toying with the idea even as I type this.

The more I've learned about Roald Dahl (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/12/22/making-it-big-roald-dahl-teller-of-the-unexpected/) over the years, the more off-putting I've found him.  The bizarreries of Willie Wonka leave me numb, and while I do remember the original book, as well as James and the Giant Peach, both holding my rapt attention when they were read (serially, over days or weeks) by a favorite teacher to my second- or third-grade class, I suspect the pleasure of being read-to was itself a large part of the appeal.

In any case, whatever his books' merits, I've yet to encounter a stage or screen adaptation of Dahl that didn't more or less suck (not to mince words) -- so having just now watched Netflix's movie of Matilda, the Musical, I'm neither surprised nor especially disappointed to add it to the pile.  Well, okay: mildly surprised that it's managed to rack up a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and disappointed by the waste of Emma Thompson (though she, at least, seems to be having fun).  When I saw the show on the West End in 2011, I was impressed by a smattering of clever stagecraft, and not much else; but of course that's all been replaced onscreen with blandly competent production design and cinematography, gussied-up with a few flashy CGI sequences.  While the movie doesn't discernibly improve Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly's stage adaptation, it at least streamlines the running time to two only-occasionally-draggy hours (compare to 2hrs 45min onstage, where almost everything, including the intermission, outstayed its welcome).

Anyway, Grinch-iness aside, if it's your cup of tea, by all means enjoy.  I can't exactly be disappointed when my expectations were so low to begin with, but I am slightly regretting having now given Minchin, Kelly, and director Matthew Warchus almost five hours of my life (between Matilda's stage and screen versions) that I kinda wish I could get back.

Last night I watched The Menu (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/movies/the-menu-review.html) on HBO Max, after having been intrigued by what I'd seen and read when it opened in theaters just before Thanksgiving.  (Turns out, it's also actually still running on a handful of screens here, or perhaps it's been brought back for awards season).

If you're in the mood for dark comedy-horror, this will satisfy nicely: it's a tidily constructed, suspenseful, deliciously nasty chamber piece with a fantastic ensemble cast.  In fact, you could watch it alongside Glass Onion for a fun evening of compare-and-contrast: two 2022 holiday releases, both gleefully skewering the 1% -- one lighter in tone, one darker; one big and flashy, the other small and austere (if no less devoted to luxe surfaces); both set on picturesque private islands where an uninvited guest stumbles into a deadly game -- the film-studies papers practically write themselves.

(Both are also that favorite subgenre of mine: movies whose stories unfold largely on a single set.  Such movies might thereby risk being criticized as "stagey" by a certain kind of film snob, but they offer both their creators and their viewers the pleasure of exploring human-scale space, and the way the characters inhabit it, in detail over time -- often, as in this case, an only-relatively-lightly compressed version of real time.  Glass Onion's prologue, and some of its flashbacks, take us off the island for only brief bits of its runtime, while The Menu is confined entirely to a single evening and a straight linear timeline, venturing off-island only as far as a short ferry ride).



Just in case The Menu's gimmick seems predictable, I'll offer one spoiler:

I enjoyed The Menu very much!

Right, @Leighton ?  I actually watched it again a few days later, and found that it held up to a second viewing very well indeed.  I caught one or two things, the second time, that land even more deftly when you already know how everything turns out.  Specifically,



Maybe it does deserve its own thread.

Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Jan 05, 2023, 02:28 AMBoth [The Menu and Glass Onion] are also that favorite subgenre of mine: movies whose stories unfold largely on a single set.  Such movies might thereby risk being criticized as "stagey" by a certain kind of film snob, but they offer both their creators and their viewers the pleasure of exploring human-scale space, and the way the characters inhabit it, in detail over time -- often, as in this case, an only-relatively-lightly compressed version of real time.

The NYT recently ran an interesting article about films that set themselves an even starker challenge: not only a single set, but one inhabited exclusively by a single actor -- a mini-genre of its own, represented here by five examples ranging from the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Buried (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/movies/24buried.html) (2010) to the currently-running (in cinemas only) Inside (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/movies/inside-review-willem-dafoe.html) starring Willem Dafoe):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/movies/inside-movie-feature-one-set.html