thoughts on Boyhood

On the bookshelves in my apartment, I have more than thirty photo albums.  I got my first one and started filling it with photos when I got my first camera at age seven, and most recently added pictures in late June of this year.  On occasion, I have gone through them looking for a specific picture or pictures and been struck how, in some ways, it seems that I am living the same year over and over.  In multiple albums, there are pictures, for example, of me decorating Christmas cookies at my parents' house.  There are multiple pictures of groups of friends sitting around dinner tables on Thanksgiving, plates full of turkey and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes.  Often, it is difficult to tell when specific pictures were taken; you can tell, maybe, by hairstyles or glasses or the absence or presence of people who have drifted in and out of my life.  And yet...there are enough photos of things that only happened once, or only happened for awhile, or people that I'll probably never see again to let me know that while life is, in fact, organized by certain holidays and traditions that do happen over and over again, it's not the same year over and over.  Friendships start and end.  New hobbies are taken up.  Vacations are taken.  I move to different places and so do other people.  People are born and people die.  And some of the most important events aren't captured on film.

The experience of watching Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he ages from six to eighteen, was similar to the experience of flipping through those old photo albums.  This is not because most of the events selected from Mason's life are ones that would be caught on film, but because of the things that change and the things that stay the same as he ages.  His parents and sister are consistently part of his life, and a few other people pop up again and again, but others-- neighbors, friends, stepfathers, and eventually girlfriends-- come and go.  He moves with his mom and sister  from a two-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom apartment to a house that his first stepfather owns to a house that his mom buys herself to his first dorm room.  He plays video games on systems that change over the years and becomes more and more interested in, and more and more skilled at, photography.  His father (Mason Sr., played by Ethan Hawke) spends a lot of Mason's life pulling up in a GTO to pick him and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) up for weekend visits, then eventually gets remarried and trades the GTO in for a mini-van.  His mother (Olivia, played by Patricia Arquette) earns her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, eventually begins teaching at the college level, and, along the way, marries and divorces men who seem great at first but turn out not to be.  The audience is reminded that time is moving forward not only by the ages of the characters, but by changes in technology, by current events (Mason Sr. rails against President George W. Bush early in the film and later takes his kids with him to campaign for Obama), and by pop culture (Olivia reads to Mason and Samantha from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone early in the film; later, Mason and Samantha dress up in costume to go get their copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

The film has a good heart.  There are some unpleasant and even terrifying moments in Mason's life (such as when Stepfather #1 drives him, Samantha, and his stepbrother and stepsister around drunk); he crosses paths with some bad people and even has experienced his first heartbreak by the end of the film.  Yet the core characters in the film-- Mason, Samantha, Mason Sr., and Olivia-- seem to be flawed but good people.  Olivia succeeds in her educational and professional goals but consistently falls for the wrong men.  Mason Sr. starts out roaring up in his GTO, taking the kids to do fun activities and forgetting not to swear around them, and then disappearing again, but eventually grows up, starts a second family, and becomes a more stable and consistent presence in the children's lives.  At one point, I was concerned that all of the men in Mason's life (which include his father, the two stepfathers he has over the years, a photography teacher, and a boss) seemed to be jerks, but then his father matures, and the teacher and boss wind up challenging him in ways that are good for him.  Again, Mason has some bad experiences and meets some bad people, but it's not a bad life, all in all. 

There are a few moments in the film that are just incredibly nice, moments when you are allowed to feel genuinely happy for the characters.  One of these is a section of the film in which Mason Sr., his wife, Annie (Jenni Tooley), and his infant son Cooper (Landon Collier) pick Samantha and Mason up and take them to visit Annie's parents.  The scene in which Mason Sr. and his new family pull up is the first in which the audience is introduced to Annie and Cooper, and we see immediately that Samantha and Mason are close with both of them.  It is Mason's fifteenth birthday, and Annie's parents proudly give Mason his first Bible and a shotgun that Annie's father tells him has been passed down in his family for generations.  The gifts aren't anything Mason would really want, but it's incredibly sweet how much Annie's parents want Mason Sr.'s kids to be included in their family.  Mason Sr.'s gifts are incredibly sweet and fatherly, too-- his first love is music (though he eventually gets a stable job in insurance), and he has painstakingly arranged all of the Beatles members' solo work into a "Black Album" for Mason, as well as bought him a shirt, tie, and jacket for things like school dances and job interviews.  It's just a really nice moment in the characters' lives-- Mason Sr. has clearly pulled himself together and is happy and surrounded by good people, and his kids are happy for him and accepting of the changes in his life. 

Olivia gets a nice moment, as well.  At one point, we see her tell a young man who is doing some work on her house that he is smart and should go to college.  A few years later, she runs into him again, and he greets her by telling her, "You probably don't remember me, but you changed my life."  He has finished community college and is working on his Bachelor's degree.  We see Olivia have a few "What am I doing?" or "Why does any of this matter?" moments over the course of the film, and even her own kids, who spend much more time with her than they do their father, are sometimes hard on her.  It's nice to see someone directly tell her that she's really done something right.

I really liked it.  The filming of the movie was spread out over twelve years, which gives it, for lack of a better word, a more genuine feel than the film might have if the same story was told with different actors playing the children over the years and the adults being made to look as if they were aging.  The pop culture, current events, and technology feel more authentic than they often do in movies set in the past, as well; some movies set in the past make such references in sort of a winky-winky way (again, for lack of a better term), like, "Oh, hey, remember when everyone was really into Harry Potter?  Remember when Facebook became a thing?  Remember when Obama was running for President?" Such references don't feel that way here; they seem like genuine reminders of what the world was like in 2002...and 2008...and so on.  I also like that we see some of the "big" moments in Mason's life (his graduation party, for example) but not all; we also see a fair number of days that are not necessarily ordinary, but that wouldn't necessarily appear in any photo album.  Because, after all, that's how most days are.

thoughts on Sex Tape (spoilers)

So...this was an awfully thin premise to base a movie around, and the only reason they're able to even get a whole movie out of this concept is that Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz's characters don't really understand how the Internet works, which doesn't make any sense, given that she is about to break a deal to become a professional blogger and he has some sort of DJ job that seems to involve uploading and sharing a crap ton of music.  Like, the events of this movie would have only been believable if we did not know that the two of them use the Internet all the time in their daily lives, and if perhaps the two were older and more out of touch.  Let's just get that out there right off the bat: the whole movie is based on a flawed and somewhat stupid premise, stretched out by having characters who seem relatively intelligent do stupid and unbelievable things.

Segel and Diaz star as Jay and Annie, a married couple with two elementary school-age children with cute old-timey names, Clive and Nell (played by Sebastian Hedges Thomas and Giselle Eisenberg, respectively).  They make a point early in the movie of letting us know that Clive is adept enough with technology that he has been put in charge of his fourth grade class's video yearbook, and also that he is, in Jay's words, kind of being a dick recently.  You would think that these two qualities-- his technology skills and his dickishness-- would allow him to eventually help his parents out, and that having a child help grown-ass adults out of a sex tape mess would be the kind of humor an R-rated comedy might go for. Spoiler alert: the movie doesn't go there.  The video yearbook eventually leads to some physical comedy when Jay jumps off a balcony to keep a child from accidentally playing the sex tape at a fourth grade graduation ceremony (I know; as one character points out, why the F if fourth grade graduation a thing?), but that's it. Missed opportunity, if you ask me, though it's hardly the movie's biggest problem.

Anyway, Jay and Annie met in college and used to have tons of sex all the time, but then once they had kids, they stopped having as much time and energy for it.  This doesn't actually come across as the World's Biggest Deal.  They seem to have a good relationship and probably just need some alone time.  Also, Annie's mom lives nearby and on two separate occasions in the film agrees to watch the kids on short notice, so you would think that getting said alone time also wouldn't be the World's Biggest Deal, but if it wasn't, there would be no movie, so...  Jay and Annie decide to spice up their marriage by making a sex tape of the two of them performing all of the positions from The Joy of Sex.  We don't get to actually see any of the sex tape until the end of the film (and what we do see is hilarious, for the record-- there are costumes, and Jason Segel singing for no real reason, and Cameron Diaz's stunt double (I would assume) doing flips off the couch), but apparently it lasts for three hours (which is implausible, but kudos to them, I guess), and they both seem to have a lot of fun making it.  The fun they have isn't actually from the recording of the sex, of course, but just from spending time together and trying new things, so they wouldn't have had to tape it to achieve the same result, but again, if they hadn't, no movie.

Jay promises to delete the movie after they're finished, but he doesn't, and it winds up getting uploaded to some sort of Cloud/Dropbox-like app that he has installed on the iPad they used to make the video.  We also learned earlier in the movie that Jay replaces his iPads pretty much any time a new model comes out and gives the older ones away as gifts, so Jay and Annie set out to find each individual iPad and delete the movies.  "Hey wait," you think to yourself even as you kind of enjoy the scenes where they go about getting the iPads back.  "This app he has installed is probably made up and I don't know exactly how it works, but if you delete the movie from the app itself, shouldn't it disappear on all of the iPads, unless people have already downloaded it to their hard drives?" The answer to this question is yes, but Jay and Annie don't find out you can do this until later.

Even so, it's clear that getting the iPads back should be simple, since they gave them all to people they know and see regularly in their daily lives, but the movie manages to stretch this out by having Jay and Annie do more stupid shit.  They find out Annie's boss's address and show up on his doorstep.  "Oh, hey," they do not say.  "You know that iPad we gave you?  Could we maybe see it for a minute to check something?"  This is literally all they would have to do.  Instead, they pretend to be there collecting money for charity, and Annie distracts her boss (Hank, played by Rob Lowe) while Jay searches for the iPad.  This leads to Annie and Hank (who seems super square but has weird tattoos and likes listening to rap and heavy metal and owns a lot of weird paintings with himself painted into scenes from Disney movies) snorting coke and Jay getting attacked by Hank's dog.  This is all kind of funny, but again, a lot of stupid, implausible stuff has to happen to make the scene possible.

And so the movie goes on in this manner.  Jay and Annie are blackmailed by a fifth-grader.  They take their kids with them to bust into the headquarters of the porn site that they learn the fifth-grader plans to upload the video to if they don't pay him $25,000. Jay, as previously mentioned, jumps off a balcony at one point.

Many of the individual scenes are pretty funny.  Like I mentioned, when we actually see the making of the sex tape, it's humorous.  The stuff with Annie's boss is funny in a bizarre sort of way.  Segel, Diaz, Lowe, Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper (who play friends that tag along for part of the iPad-retrieving journey), and Jack Black (who plays a porn site owner) all give good performances.  Unfortunately, all of the funny scenes and strong performances are taking place in a movie that doesn't make a lot of sense.

thoughts on Ruby Sparks (spoilers)

Paul Dano stars as Calvin Weir-Fields, a writer who is regarded a genius but can't get anywhere on the second novel he is supposed to be working on.  He seems to be in a bit of a slump, in general.  His girlfriend of five years has left him.  He doesn't really have any friends other than his brother, Harry (Chris Messina).  He got his dog, Scotty, because he thought that Scotty would help him get out and meet people; however, Scotty is scared of strangers and "pees like a girl."  One day, Calvin's therapist, Dr. Rosenthal (Elliott Gould), suggests that Calvin should write about someone who likes Scotty just as he is. 

He comes up with Ruby (Zoe Kazan), a painter from Dayton, Ohio, and finds himself really enjoying writing about her; at one point, he confesses that he thinks that he's falling in love with her, and that he looks forward to writing just so that he can spend time with her.  He lets Harry read what he has so far, and Harry tells him that the woman he has created is completely unrealistic.  Real women, Harry points out, have real flaws, not just quirks that make them endearing (Harry's wife, for example, is sometimes "mean as shit for no reason," Harry says).  Regardless, one morning when Calvin wakes up, Ruby has materialized as if out of thin air and is, for all intents and purposes, real.  Calvin is skeptical at first, but eventually he accepts that this has happened, and she becomes his girlfriend.  He only lets Harry in on the secret that he has created her; when Harry learns that Calvin can make Ruby do whatever he wants simply by writing it, he encourages Calvin to take advantage of this.  Calvin swears that he will never write about her again and will let her be, and he sticks to this for quite some time.  Eventually, though, he changes his mind, though every way he tries to change her backfires.  When she wants to spend more time apart, he writes that she is miserable without him...and she becomes so clingy that he can't even go to the bathroom or answer the phone.  He then writes that she is "effervescently happy"...but she remains so no matter what he does, whether he wants to leave her or wants to hole up in the house.

Calvin is a deeply flawed character.  This isn't to say that he's poorly written or unrealistic; however, I found him too off-putting to care about.  For example, Harry points out that he didn't give Ruby realistic flaws; I found it more disturbing that Calvin gave her no life outside of him.  She's supposedly a painter, but we never see her paint.  At one point, Calvin discourages her from going out and getting a job.  She is an orphan.  Now, he has no idea that she's going to come to life at the time he determines this detail, so it's not like he makes her an orphan so that he'll never have to meet her parents, or anything...but why, as a writer, did he not want/think to create people from her past?  Is this supposed to be a comment on how a lot of women in films aren't really well-developed or well-thought-out?  Perhaps, but Ruby isn't perfect enough or shallow enough to be a parody of the typical woman in, say, a romantic comedy (Jennifer Garner's character in The Invention of Lying comes closer to that); it just really seems like Calvin can't deal with a woman with a full life that doesn't revolve around him.  At one point, we meet his ex-girlfriend, Lila (Deborah Ann Woll), and she basically says as much-- that he had this idea of what she was supposed to be like and got upset when she didn't conform to it. 

He seems to impose this on everyone in his life, from Scotty to his mother (Annette Bening), who has apparently changed a lot since Calvin's father's death, but who seems happy, and whose new husband (Antonio Banderas) seems like a nice enough guy, if a bit new-agey.  It's a very unattractive character trait, though I wonder if it could have been made more understandable with a different actor or with more backstory.  It seems that this need to control everyone around him might have developed with his father's death, but since we're seeing everything from Calvin's perspective, we don't get any scenes where other characters discuss whether this is a recent change.  Or maybe Ruby could have asked him some questions about his past and pulled this out of him...but Calvin doesn't seem interested in having deep conversations with her or getting to know her, just in having her behave exactly as he wants her to.  It's frustrating.  Calvin does eventually set Ruby free, but it's unclear whether he really learns anything from the experience, or if the whole thing just gives him fodder to finish his novel.

I didn't particularly care for it.  It's kind of an interesting idea, and I always like Chris Messina; however, I just had too many problems with Calvin as a character.

thoughts on Party Down (spoilers)

First of all, the way I was introduced to this series (which originally ran on Starz from 2009-2010) is pretty funny.  I posted this article about why you should be watching the show Masters of Sex to Facebook; the article included a clip from Party Down that was funny and included some familiar faces.  I asked my Facebook friends what this show was and why I had never heard of it, and immediately received several responses about how great and funny it was.  Since I got the discs from Netflix and started watching the series, I've found myself bringing the show up in in-person conversations quite a bit, and inevitably someone will say, "Oh, I love Party Down!" The best is when someone specifically mentions the Steve Guttenberg episode, because that one's my favorite.  Anyway, I love that it's a show that apparently many people besides me have already heard of, yet I'm just finding out about it now thanks to the wonders that are Masters of Sex and Facebook.

Anyway, Adam Scott stars as Henry Pollard, a failed actor whose claim to fame is that he once starred in a beer commercial in which he uttered the line, "Are we having fun yet?!" People constantly recognize him from this; initially, they can't quite place where they know him from, and he always tries to say that he just has "one of those faces." Inevitably, they figure it out, and talk him into saying the line.  He worked at Party Down Catering years ago and finds himself back there after he decides to give up acting for good.  He is the most down-to-earth and likable person on the catering crew while also, in some ways, the saddest.  He's given up on his acting career even though there are hints that he is probably actually a very good actor.  He considers moving back in with his parents at one point.  At the end of the first season, he is promoted to Team Leader of the catering crew, but winds up giving it up several episodes into the second season because he doesn't want even the small amount of responsibility the job involves.  He winds up getting more heartbreak than joy from his "casual hook-up thing" with fellow caterer Casey (Lizzy Caplan), then falls into a relationship with rival caterer Uda Bengt (Kristen Bell).  He seems to have given up all hope and ambition...but there are hints, toward the end of the series, that maybe he's getting those things back.  He "rolls the dice" in a late episode by deciding to end things with Uda (though she breaks up with him before he gets the chance to actually do so) and turn down a corporate job with Party Down (though again, that opportunity disappears before he gets to actually reject it) in favor of trying again with Casey.  At the very end of the last episode, we see him going on an audition for a part he really wants.  We're meeting this character at a weird transitional time in his life, but it seems like things are going to be okay for him.

That's one thing that's fairly brilliant about this show. Many of the members of the Party Down crew are trying to break into show business, but because we mostly see them at their "day job," we don't often get to see a lot of the particulars of what they actually do; we see them catering, where they seem to spend a lot of their time goofing off, drinking, hooking up, and occasionally doing drugs.  There are moments, though, where we're allowed to see that some of these people probably actually have a shot at making it.  Casey gets a small part in a Judd Apatow movie; though the part is ultimately cut, we sense that it's probably not the end for her.  Kyle (Ryan Hansen) is good-looking, charming, and really sweet; we sense that he could have a future as an actor even though his "base jumping movie" goes straight to video and he spends most of his time at work hitting on women and feuding with fellow caterer Roman (Martin Starr).  Roman, a would-be sci-fi screenwriter ("I'm a writer! I write books! And screenplays! I have a blog!"), is a very particular combination of nerd and dick that can't get laid even when he's fully disguised as a famous rock star, and that just can't stop himself from explaining in detail to a woman why dragons are fantasy, not sci-fi, even though she might be into him if he could stop being a know-it-all for five seconds.  Yet there is a moment in the aforementioned Steve Guttenberg episode where we see that he might actually have a chance as a sci-fi screenwriter if he could find the right writing partner and/or mentor to rein him in.  These people haven't made it yet, and they're not as smooth and polished as the caterers from rival Valhalla Catering (nor do they care enough about their jobs to be), but they're not hopeless, either.  We also see genuine moments of camaraderie between them, such as when they square off in kickball against Valhalla at a company picnic, or when Henry and Casey try to stop Constance (Jane Lynch) from signing an outrageous pre-nup at her series finale wedding.

One of the most interesting characters is Ron (Ken Marino), the only Party Down crewmember to not even be tangentially involved in the entertainment industry, as well as the only one to really take his job seriously.  He is a recovering alcoholic and drug user; in a late Season One episode, he is thrilled when Party Down is hired to cater his own twenty-year high school reunion.  He can't wait to show everyone that he (who ruined his class's senior trip by chugging a bottle of whiskey and getting sent to the emergency room) is clean and sober and has a leadership position with the catering crew.  Once there, though, he winds up finding out that everyone is making fun of him for being so proud of his catering job, and he winds up pulling a repeat performance with the whiskey and emergency room.  His dream is to own a Soup or Crackers franchise, and he does for awhile...only the whole company goes bankrupt within a year.  The end of the series, though, finds him clean and sober again, and looking like he is heading towards running Party Down.  He has his own demons and failures to contend with...but still he's optimistic and hopeful and actually seems to have a chance at achieving his goals, small though those goals might seem to some.  It's pretty sweet.

I thought it was brilliant, really.  The catering premise meant that every episode found the crew in a new setting (an ill-attended Sweet Sixteen party...an NFL draft party for a closeted gay quarterback...an after party for porn industry awards) with plenty of fun guest stars (one of the producers is Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, which means that we wind up seeing a lot of Veronica Mars alum, including the aforementioned Bell, Hansen, and Marino, as well as Enrico Colantoni and Jason Dohring, among others; we also, at different times in the series, see the aforementioned Guttenberg, in addition to J.K. Simmons, Joey Lauren Adams, and Ken Jeong, just to name a few).  You also, along the way, got a fair amount of character development, as well as good chemistry among the cast.  It seems like it could have lasted awhile; Jane Lynch's exit at the end of the first season and subsequent replacement by Megan Mullally indicated that there was room for the cast to change if or when actors wanted to leave or it became realistic for the characters to move on from Party Down.  I wish that it would have lasted longer, but am glad I found what there was of it.  Thanks to all who recommended it.

thoughts on Obvious Child (spoilers)

Jenny Slate stars as Donna Stern, a comedian who, in the span of a few days, gets dumped (her boyfriend tells her that he has been sleeping with a friend of hers) and learns that the bookstore she has worked at for five years is closing down.  In the aftermath of this, she has drunken sex with a guy she meets following a particularly bad stand-up comedy performance.  They probably do not use a condom (we are shown some drunken fumbling with one; she later tells a friend that she remembers seeing a condom, but she isn't sure "what it did").  A few weeks later, she learns that she is pregnant.  She decides to get an abortion.  Though she had expected the drunken sex to be a one-night stand, she keeps running into the guy (Max, played by Jake Lacy), and he seems really sweet.  She struggles with whether to tell him about the pregnancy and upcoming abortion, then how to tell him.  Her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffman), and her mom (Polly Draper) provide emotional support.

This is not the type of movie where characters make epic speeches or have huge epiphanies or get into shouting matches, or where dramatic music plays on the soundtrack underscoring how we're supposed to feel.  We're just invited into Donna's life for a few weeks and shown how she deals with things.  I cringed when she left drunken messages on her ex's answering machine, as well as when she and Max fumbled with, but probably did not use, a condom.  I was touched by a scene in which Donna climbs into bed with her mom.  I appreciated that Max showed up with flowers on the morning of her abortion even though she wound up breaking the news to him onstage as part of her stand-up comedy routine; I liked that he was able to recognize that regardless of how she told him, the most important thing was that he be there for her.  I laughed at some of the dialogue, even though it included a few too many fart jokes for my taste.  I was glad that Donna seemed to have a lot of really kind and supportive people in her life. 

Because the film is missing the aforementioned epic speeches and huge epiphanies and dramatic music playing on the soundtrack, we are left to merely observe.  We may or may not always like or approve of what we are seeing in front of us.  The point is that we can have an opinion about what happens in Donna's life, but we don't get to have a say.

thoughts on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the predecessor to this film, most of the humans' troubles come from their own stupidity, arrogance, and general disrespect for and misunderstanding of animals.  Here, the humans are mostly good people, and the hyper-intelligent apes that populate the woods near San Francisco are generally peaceful and good-natured as well...but there are loose cannons in both groups that make it clear that any peace that currently exists between humans and apes is tenuous at best.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens with a montage of news clips that inform us that much of the human population has been wiped out by the "simian flu" that was introduced at the end of Rise.  A small group living in what remains of San Francisco wanders into the apes' territory near the beginning of the film hoping to use the dam on their land to get their power going so that they can try to establish contact with other survivors.  They get off on the wrong foot, though, when one moron (Carver, played by Kirk Acevedo) gets trigger-happy and shoots the apes' leader's son.  No one is actually killed in the skirmish, and fortunately, the apes' leader (Caesar, the ape raised by James Franco's character in Rise, played by Andy Serkis) is peaceful; however, Koba (Toby Kebbell) is definitely not, and he wants war with the humans.  A few of the humans (Malcolm, Ellie, and Alex, played by Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, respectively) manage to broker a tentative peace with Caesar and are allowed to do the work they need to do.  However, unrest between Caesar and Koba, as well as the fact that there are a number of humans who don't understand why they're negotiating with apes in the first place; who are scared of the apes; and/or who don't really give a crap how many apes they hurt while accomplishing their goals pretty much ensures that the humans and apes won't be living in harmony for long.

I enjoyed the previous film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, even though much of what happened in that film was completely ridiculous, with even the "good" characters doing things that were so stupid as to almost be unbelievable.  Here, though some people do bad things, their actions usually at least somewhat make sense, given the circumstances.  I will also give this film credit for taking longer than I expected before devolving into mad, human-on-ape battle, and at least keeping something of a real story going even after the film does go there.  Though Dawn makes more sense and is probably an objectively better film than Rise, though, I kind of felt like it was missing something.  Some reviews have pointed out that we pretty much know going in how the whole thing is going to end, so perhaps suspense is the missing element.  We are also missing any relationships with the depth of what we saw between Will (James Franco) and Caesar in the first film; Malcolm and Ellie make friends with Caesar in this movie, but the whole thing (with the exception of the backstory set up at the beginning) takes place over just a few days.  The first film took place over the course of literally years, so we got to see the relationships progress and change; here, we get that the humans have forged relationships and even makeshift families in the aftermath of the simian flu, but we didn't get to see those relationships form, and so much of the characters' interaction takes place in the midst of action that the relationships stay pretty shallow for us as an audience.

I thought it was just okay.  There were some good things about it, but overall, I felt like it was missing a lot of the emotional depth of Rise. 

thoughts on Begin Again

Spoiler alert: Adam Levine does not take his shirt off for even one second in this movie. For those of you who, like me, kind of assumed he would and are kind of disappointed by this news, here is the video for Maroon 5's "This Love."  In this video, he also frolics in some fake (or at least oddly shallow) sand and wears a bandana around his wrist for some reason.  Also, while I'm not a Maroon 5 fan per se, I do listen to a lot of pop music and can fairly confidently say that this is their best song. At any rate: you're welcome.



 

 

Anyway, so Keira Knightley stars as Greta, a songwriter who has followed her singer boyfriend Dave, played by the aforementioned Levine, from England to New York City.  He has recently had some songs placed on a movie soundtrack and has been flown to New York to record a whole album.  At first, he's super sweet and committed to including Greta in the process of making the album, but within a month, he has dumped her for a record label exec named Mim (Jennifer Li Jackson).  Greta goes to stay with Steve (James Corden), a friend from back home, and makes plans to head back to England the very next day.  First, though, Steve takes her out to an open mic night and convinces her to get onstage and sing one of her songs.  The crowd barely looks up from their drinks, but she catches the eye of Dan (Mark Ruffalo), an extremely down-on-his-luck, possibly alcoholic record exec who is separated from his wife, Miriam (Catherine Keener), and doesn't have much of a relationship with his teenage daughter, Violet (Hailee Steinfeld).  He has also just been fired from the record company that he helped build; he sees Greta as his way back in.  The record company wants her to make a demo, as is par for the course in the business, but Dan gets the idea that they will instead record an "outdoor album" all over New York.  He assembles a group of ragtag musicians that includes Steve, a couple of students, a guy who currently plays piano for children's dance classes, a few professionals who owe him favors, and eventually his daughter, and they get started.

That sounds like kind of a lot of set-up, right? It kind of is, but the film handles it well; the film starts with Greta singing her song onstage to a disinterested crowd, then gives us the backstories that show us how she and Dan got there.  It gives us these stories in a simple, non-cutesy way, meaning there are no subtitles labeling them as, "Dan: Down-on-his-Luck Music Exec," or "Greta: Recently Dumped Musician," which I could picture in a different kind of movie.  And these stories are important, because an album like the one they are making could only be made by people who have nothing left to lose. 

Literally all of my favorite movies (Walk the Line, Almost Famous, School of Rock, and That Thing You Do!) are about musicians or bands, and all of the movies on that list include both great soundtracks and iconic scenes centered around music and performance.  Remember when the Almost Famous gang sang along to "Tiny Dancer" on the tour bus?  Remember the sheer joy of Guy Patterson and the Wonders jumping and dancing around Guy's father's appliance store as they heard "That Thing You Do!" on the radio for the first time?  If you've seen those movies, of course you do.  They're scenes that illustrate what music can do: it can bring people together.  It can make everything okay when nothing is.  It can cause such pure, unadulterated joy that you just can't sit still.  I don't love the music in Begin Again as much as I love the music in the aforementioned movies, but that is more a reflection of my own taste-- as I said, I listen to lots of pop, both pop rock and pop country-- than of the film itself, because we get plenty of the types of scenes I've just alluded to.  Dan and Greta connect over a set of shared headphones as Greta shares her favorite "guilty pleasure" songs.  Steve leads everyone in a game where he plays a song and sees how long it takes before they all just can't help themselves from dancing.  Dan and Violet connect as he plays bass and Violet plays guitar on one of Greta's songs.  Greta gets closure on her relationship with Dave as she watches him sing one of her songs the way she wrote it, without all of the overproduction that has started to take over his music.

As is probably evident, my very favorite thing about this movie are the scenes that illustrate the joy and power of music...but these scenes aren't the only thing I loved.  The roles are all perfectly cast.  The relationships play out messily, yet just right: Dave isn't right for Greta anymore as either a musical or romantic partner, but the demise of their relationship led her to that stage, in that bar, in front of that record exec on open mic night.  There's a moment where you think there might maybe be something romantic or sexual between Dan and Greta, but they don't go there, and they shouldn't: they are making this album to get through or to something, and they need each other for that, but only that.

It's a great film.  Our lives are guided largely by chance and shaped by messy relationships. And for these people, music does more than just provide the soundtrack to all of it.