Two Off-Beat Streaming Picks: The Incredible Jessica James and Opening Night

Posted on July 31, 2017 at 9:37 pm

Not in the mood for superheroes? Two indie picks worth watching premiere this week on streaming services.

“The Incredible Jessica James” (Netflix) is a star-making vehicle for Jessica Williams, “The Daily Show’s” youngest correspondent. She had a small role in the previous film from writer/director Jim Strouse, and he wrote this film for her. As it opens, she does a fierce, funny, and free dance through her apartment and onto the roof and by the time the credits are over, we are completely captivated. The story is nothing new. She’s an aspiring playwright trying to find her way in New York City, with a wall covered in rejection letters and a heart recently broken in a breakup with a guy (Lakeith Stanfield) who is very appealing, so we feel for her. She attends her younger sister’s baby shower. She tries to help a young girl in the drama class she teaches. She goes on a blind date. She has a quirky/quippy best friend (Noel Wells). It’s a pretty standard romantic comedy. But Williams has a nice chemistry with Chris Dowd as her possible new love, there are some funny lines, and she is utterly irresistible. See it. You’ll have fun and you’ll always be able to say that right from the beginning you knew she’d be a star.

“Opening Night” (Amazon) is a backstage story about a dumb jukebox musical and all of the drama and chaos that goes into giving the audience a great show. It’s wildly uneven, as though it was put together by an improv group or maybe its large cast each wrote a premise on a slip of paper and then everyone picked one out of a hat. Topher Grace is appealing, as always, if slumming a bit as the one-time performer turned stage manager, dealing with various crises of love, fear, and various substances. A plotline about male and female dancers competing to seduce the new guy goes on way too long and way too far as does another about the cynical star’s accidental ingestion of drugs. It’s the kind of raunchy that indicates a failure of imagination. What makes it fun is the cast of real theatrical performers who show us that the show really must go on. It kind of makes me wish we were sitting out front to see them do the whole show.

Related Tags:

VOD and Streaming

Truth

Posted on October 22, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Often a movie “based on a true story” confirms and extends our understanding of what happened. This film, based on the “true story” that led to the departure of one of the most respected newsmen of all time, Dan Rather, from CBS, asserts its ambitions with its title and goes on to explore the very nature of truth and our willingness or ability to uncover and recognize it. I did not have strong views about what happened in 2004, just a recollection of the incident as a turning point, with the most respected broadcast journalist in the country being brought down by bloggers, who were able to determine that documents relied on in a story about President George W. Bush were forgeries. In my mind, the story was about the shift from old to new media, where the Davids of the blogosphere could challenge the powerful Goliaths of CBS News.

But in this movie, based on the book by Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett, blazingly intelligent and forceful), we see another side of the story, written by James Vanderbilt. This is her version (if there is such a thing as versions) of the truth.

No matter which version of the story you believe, lesson number one of this movie is that you are at your most vulnerable when you feel most powerful. Mapes has just come off the greatest triumph of her career, the Peabody award-winning story about the horrific abuse of prisoners by the US military at Abu Ghraib. She is looking for another great scoop, and as the Presidential election approaches, it looks like she has one. Rumors about special treatment for George W. Bush, both in being allowed to serve in the National Guard and during his time there, have circulated for years, and now there seems to be substantiation, including on-the-record statements by the former Lieutenant Governor and some memos from the younger Bush’s commanding officer. Four document experts were called in by Mapes to authenticate the documents and, with the proviso that as photocopies there was no way to test the ink or paper of the originals to verify them completely, the experts signed off. The other steps taken by Mapes and the staff of reporters, including research expert Mike Smith (Topher Grace, who should be in more movies) and former military officer Dennis Quaid (ditto), are impressive. But it is possible that their supervisors did not ask enough questions and it is certain that moving up the broadcast date at the last minute cut off their ability to lock down all of the story.

And then it all fell apart. Bloggers identified problems with the memos’ fonts that indicated they were created on a computer, not a typewriter, and thus could not have been written in the 1970’s. CBS convened a commission led by a former (Republican) Attorney General to review the story. Their focus was not as much on whether the story was true or not (the memos were just one small part of the story) but whether the reporters had a political agenda.

A lot of people got fired. Smith makes a speech on the way out the door that identifies a culprit more insidious than partisan politics — corporate conflicts of interest. There are times when protection of shareholder value is not consistent with getting the story. The most important question this movie asks is what that means for democracy and for, well, truth.

Parents should know that this movie has very strong language and brief nudity in a photograph. Characters drink and take medicine to deal with stress. There are references to torture and child abuse and there are tense confrontations.

Family discussion: What should Mary have done differently? How did her childhood experiences affect her relationship with Rather and her response to her father? Should she have followed her lawyer’s advice?

If you like this, try two other fact-based films about journalists fighting to expose the truth about powerful people: “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight“

Related Tags:

Trailer: “Truth” with Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett

Posted on September 29, 2015 at 9:00 am

Robert Redford plays Dan Rather, one of the most respected journalists in television, whose career collapsed after he reported a story about George W. Bush’s military service that turned out to be based on forged documents. Cate Blanchett and Topher Grace co-star in “Truth,” which tells that story.

Related Tags:

Trailers, Previews, and Clips

“The Beauty Inside” — A Social Media Movie

Posted on August 24, 2012 at 3:59 pm

The Washington Post reports that a new movie called “The Beauty Inside” will invite the audience to become part of the film. Computer chip giant Intel is

teaming up with Toshiba to give aspiring actors an opportunity to star in a multi-part film alongside the likes of Topher Grace and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The movie is directed by Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film director Drake Doremus. The first episode, which was released on Aug. 16, has received multiple shares on Facebook and views on YouTube — a great marketing coup for the two tech companies.

The next installment lands Thursday.

The film centers around Alex, a protagonist who, every day, is someone different. The film, narrated by Grace, reveals Alex’s struggles as a different person, particularly as it relates to his sex life, and his chronicling of his various personalities. Aspiring actors can audition bysubmitting their photo and video via Facebook to Doremus and his team. A lucky few will be chosen over the course of the five films to star alongside the two-person celebrity cast.

A character will carry and use an Intel-powered Toshiba laptop through the film (note the film’s title), making it not just crowd-sourced but product placement/infomercial-based as well.

Related Tags:

Behind the Scenes

Take Me Home Tonight

Posted on March 3, 2011 at 5:44 pm

This is the movie John Cusack never made, a loving tribute to the 1980’s and especially to the music and movies of the era from “Say Anything” to “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” “Take Me Home Tonight” doesn’t go for cheap “had we but known” or “how could we be so cheesy/wear that/like them?” jokes (I’m talking to you, Hot Tub Time Machine) but instead relies on our nostalgia for the 80’s and for what we did to muddle through them. It takes us home to “I Love the 80’s” land with the opening shot: “Video Killed the Radio Star” played on an enormous boom box.

Twins Matt (Topher Grace) and Wendy (Anna Faris) Franklin have recently graduated from college and are still living at home. Wendy is on the brink of the next step, with a serious boyfriend (her real-life husband Chris Pratt) and applications to graduate school. But Matt seems stuck. He has a job behind the counter at Suncoast Video. And he is still dreaming of the girl he had a crush on in high school, golden girl Tori Frederking (Teresa Palmer). If only, Matt tells Wendy and his best friend Barry (Dan Fogler) so often that they recite it along with him — if only there had been an opening for him to pursue her back at Shermer High School (yes, the name comes from “The Breakfast Club”). And then, Tori walks into the store.

In a spasm of fear, desperation, and longing, Matt impulsively tries to act like the kind of person he thinks would impress Tori. He pretends not to remember her. And, when he finds out she’s working for the (now-defunct) financial firm Drexel Burnham, he pretends to be working at Goldman Sachs. They agree to meet up at a big party, cuing up all of the ingredients for a very wild night.

It has shoulder pads for girls and blazer sleeves pushed up to the elbow for guys, “Come on Eileen,” Wang Chung, and “Straight Outta Compton” (sung by Matt and Barry as they steal a car to impress Tori) and a trampoline scene like Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins in “Big.” It’s all with such unabashed affection for the era and its characters that it is hard not to share it.

Grace, who produced the film, is one of Hollywood’s most likable leading men with comic timing unmatched since (while we’re talking about the 80’s) Michael J. Fox. The scene where Matt thinks the worst has happened, only to find that more bad news is ahead, works far better than it has any right to. As Matt’s unconstrained id counterpart, Tony-winner Dan Fogler spends a lot of time out of control (and some of it coked out as well), but he manages to give Barry some sweetness, too, whether competing in an impromptu dance-off or mingling lust and terror at an invitation from what 20 years later would be called a cougar. Faris is underused but a pleasure to watch as always and Palmer brings a pleasant freshness and decency to the underwritten dream girl role. It won’t make anyone want to go back to the 80’s, but it might make them want to see Grace’s next film.

Related Tags:

Comedy Romance