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Tag Archives: Tim Robbins

Marjorie Prime (2017)

09 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Artificial intelligence, Drama, Geena Davis, Humour, Jon Hamm, Lois Smith, Memory, Michael Almereyda, Review, Tim Robbins

D: Michael Almereyda / 99m

Cast: Jon Hamm, Lois Smith, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins, Stephanie Andujar, Hannah Gross

How much do you trust your memories? Or rather, how much can you trust your memories? And where do they come from? Are they exclusively made up of your own recollections, or are they a combination of what you can remember and the recollections of others? And can they ever be really regarded as true memories, an accurate representation of something that happened in the past? These are just some of the questions that Marjorie Prime asks as it ponders the nature of memory, its provenance, and its importance in our lives.

Michael Almereyda’s latest movie is a challenging examination of how we remember things, and why. The why is perhaps more important than the how, but it’s how our memories shape our character and our personalities, and help us connect our past and present lives that seems to be more important. But if memory can be elusive, if it can be confusing, or contrary, or unreliable, then how can we know if a memory carries the weight that it should do? How can it retain the meaning it relies on to be an accurate memory? Almereyda’s answer – adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Jordan Harrison – is that, ultimately, we can’t be sure of anything related to memory because there are just too many variables. And many of those variables are the memories of other people.

The movie begins with Marjorie (Smith) having a conversation with a younger facsimile of her late husband, Walter (Hamm) (Walter is a computer programme, an example of artificial intelligence used as memory therapy). Together they probe various memories and attitudes towards memory that are largely to do with Marjorie’s attempts at building a coherent narrative out of her past. Walter is a computer-driven replica of Marjorie’s husband at the time of their engagement. He already knows a lot about Marjorie and the man he represents, but his knowledge is far from complete. In order to further his knowledge, and his usefulness to Marjorie – whose own memory is under threat from the early onset of Alzheimer’s – he discusses their shared past and allows her to correct him whenever he gets something wrong. Walter at first believes that they were watching My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) when he proposed to her, but Marjorie is eqaully sure that it was Casablanca (1942), or at least that Michael Curtiz’s perennial classic seems more likely. Marjorie’s memory of that event is eluding her, so she creates a memory that sounds like it could be true, and once it’s accepted by the programme acting as Walter, then it passes into memory, and into truth.

And then there’s the input from Marjorie’s daughter, Tess (Davis), and her husband, Jon (Robbins). Both talk to Walter and both express their own feelings and views on events that happened to Marjorie during her life, and they don’t confine themselves to moments that they have direct knowledge or recollection of. Walter accepts what they tell him without verification or any kind of fact-checking being carried out. And when he relays their recollections to Marjorie – like him – she accepts these as having really happened. But how can such memories truly be “real” when they’re an amalgam of various sources?  With the frailty of the human mind being explored in this way, Almereyda shows us how unreliable our memories really are, and how our need to provide context for them can often mean we overlook any contentious issues that may arise from remembering them. The more we remember, Almereyda seems to be saying, the more we actually forget.

By showing the pitfalls of allowing future technology to “guide” us through the labyrinth of our reminiscences, Marjorie Prime highlights just how memory and truth can be ephemeral and an unreliable witness to our own experiences. Tess refers to the way in which we remember the emotion of an experience rather than the fact of it, and how this informs the details of that experience. From this we can understand that feelings and emotions are often more important than the facts, and can help us to derive a better appreciation or understanding of what we’re trying to remember. But these impressions can be just as subjective or erroneous as the memory itself, and as the movie progresses, and focuses more and more on Tess and Jon’s relationship and their own recollections, Almereyda uses the shift in perspective to show how relative memory really is. And there are further narrative shifts that provide even more examples of how memory can collude with us in providing the kind of recollections that help us make sense of our world and the world around us (and especially, other people). Layer upon layer upon layer, and soon the source can no longer be recognised. But is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Sensibly, Almereyda doesn’t provide the viewer with any conclusions, merely more and more questions, some of which can be answered within the narrative itself, and others that remain a mystery, fleeting notions of recognition that may or may not be reliable. The movie regards these questions as components in a kind of mental jigsaw puzzle, and in trying to piece them together, the characters all behave as though their own memories are more credible than others. Even Marjorie, whose moments of lucid behaviour grow fewer and further apart, believes what she remembers, and when she discusses with Walter their shared history, there are moments where she is creating rather than looking back. The same can be said for Tess and Jon, who want to help Marjorie retain her memory for as long as possible, but who also create incidents and details out of a misguided sense of being supportive. As in so many areas of life, lies become truth, and the boundaries between the two become irrevocably blurred, no matter how good the original intention.

Marjorie Prime is a small movie about big ideas, but important ones nevertheless, and the dialogue is smart, funny and precise in its statements and observations. The cast all give measured, thoughtful performances, with Smith (reprising her role in the original stage production) offering a particularly sprightly portrayal of Marjorie that is both sympathetic and endearing. Against this, Hamm has the more challenging role as Walter, a synthetic approximation of a person who has no life experience except that which is given to him by others. As the sometimes feuding Tess and Jon, Davis and Robbins give expression to the rituals that they go through in order to provide certainty for their own memories, and then Marjorie’s as well, but without seeing the problems inherent in doing this. All four actors are mesmerising, especially Davis, who plays a character who’s increasingly conflicted over the benefits of (re-)constructed memories, and who is stricken by memories of her own that are unwanted.

Viewers may find the opening exchange between Marjorie and Walter a little slow going, and the introduction of several minor characters later on may make the movie feel a little fragmented, but otherwise this is intelligent, thought-provoking stuff that isn’t afraid to tackle big ideas head on. It has a wintry, melancholy feel to it, highlighted by the starkly beautiful cinematography of Sean Price Williams, and a deftly supportive, and unobtrusive score by Mica Levi that provides an effective counterpoint to the emotional turmoil experienced by the characters. But it’s Almereyda’s confident, assured direction that remains the movie’s most impressive element, and proof – if it were needed – that he is one of the most distinctive and talented voices working in movies today.

Rating: 9/10 – an award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, few movies made at the moment have the rigorousness or the attention to detail that infuses Marjorie Prime and which make it a movie to admire and to lose oneself in; if you’re a fan of cinema as a reflection of real life and all its flaws and imperfections, then this is a movie that will reward you over and over again.

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Monthly Roundup – August 2016

03 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Perfect Day, Aid workers, Animation, Benicio Del Toro, Blue Sky, Curt Siodmak, Denis Leary, Drama, Espionage, EVP, Fedja Stukan, Fernando León de Aranoa, Galen T. Chu, Harrison Gilbertson, Haunt, Haunted house, Horror, Ice Age: Collision Course, Ione Skye, Jacki Weaver, Jean Byron, John Leguizamo, Ken Hughes, King Donovan, Liana Liberato, Little Red Monkey, Mac Carter, Mélanie Thierry, Meteorite, Mike Thurmeier, Morello Curse, Murder, Nuclear scientists, Olga Kurylenko, Queen Latifah, Ray Romano, Review, Richard Carlson, Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Sci-fi, Scrat, Simon Pegg, Spaceship, Sylva Langova, The Balkans, The Fifties, The Magnetic Monster, Thriller, Tim Robbins

The Magnetic Monster (1953) / D: Curt Siodmak / 76m

Cast: Richard Carlson, King Donovan, Jean Byron, Harry Ellerbe, Leo Britt, Leonard Mudie, Byron Foulger, Michael Fox

The Magnetic Monster

Rating: 6/10 – a sample of selenium, bombarded with alpha waves, becomes a lethal danger to mankind as it develops exponentially – and only the A-Men from the Office of Scientific Investigation can stop it; an exposition heavy sci-fi thriller that takes time out for (stranger) domestic interludes involving Carlson and Bryan, The Magnetic Monster packs a lot in to its relatively short running time and is unexpectedly entertaining for all its techno-speak and overly serious demeanour.

Haunt (2014) / D: Mac Carter / 86m

Cast: Harrison Gilbertson, Liana Liberato, Ione Skye, Jacki Weaver, Brian Wimmer, Danielle Chuchran, Ella Harris, Carl Hadra

Haunt

Rating: 3/10 – a family move into a house where tragedy struck the previous owners, and the son (Gilbertson), along with abused neighbour Sam (Liberato), discovers that the place is haunted by a vengeful spectre; muddled, confused and scare-free, Haunt aims for unsettling and frightening but misses by a mile thanks to weak plotting, a jumbled storyline, stock characters, absentee direction, and an overbearing score (and that’s without mentioning the performances, particularly Weaver’s – which is dreadful).

Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) / D: Mike Thurmeier, Galen T. Chu / 94m

Cast: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah, Simon Pegg, Keke Palmer, Adam Devine, Wanda Sykes, Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, Jennifer Lopez, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jessie J, Nick Offerman, Chris Wedge

Ice Age Collision Course

Rating: 5/10 – while Scrat does his best to keep his acorn safe aboard a spaceship, his actions lead to a massive meteorite heading for Earth, which in turn leads to Manny (Romano) and the usual gang having to formulate a plan to avoid the extinction of them all; while the series can still manage to sprinkle a handful of inspired visual gags throughout each entry (and this is no different), the law of diminishing returns is having a savage effect on the storylines, with this outing proving less than inspired, and leaving the characters teetering on the edge of becoming their own caricatures.

Little Red Monkey (1955) / D: Ken Hughes / 71m

aka The Case of the Red Monkey

Cast: Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Sylva Langova, Colin Gordon, Donald Bisset, John King-Kelly, Bernard Rebel, Arnold Marlé, John Horsley

Little Red Monkey

Rating: 7/10 – when several nuclear scientists are murdered, and the culprit appears to be a little red monkey, Scotland Yard and a visiting US State Department agent have to make sure that defecting Professor Leon Dushenko (Marlé) doesn’t end up dead as well; an agreeable, fast-paced thriller, Little Red Monkey mixes international espionage, early Cold War paranoia, romance, and intrigue to good effect, and thanks to the script by Hughes and James Eastwood, has a discreet Hitchcockian vibe that benefits it tremendously.

A Perfect Day (2015) / D: Fernando León de Aranoa / 106m

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko, Mélanie Thierry, Fedja Stukan, Eldar Residovic, Sergi López

A Perfect Day

Rating: 7/10 – a group of aid workers in the war-torn Balkans try to have a dead body removed from a well that provides drinking water, and are met by every type of obstruction possible – bureaucratic, cultural, and just plain bizarre; A Perfect Day‘s very good cast can’t mitigate against the episodic nature of the story, or de Aranoa’s offhand treatment of some of the minor characters, but otherwise this is a pointed, unsentimental look at the quieter horrors that war can throw up, and when it wants to be, uses black humour as a trenchant counterpoint to all the tragedy.

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Welcome to Me (2014)

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

$86m, Borderline Personality Disorder, Comedy, Drama, James Marsden, Joan Cusack, Kristen Wiig, Linda Cardellini, Lottery win, Mental health, Review, Shira Piven, Swan boat, Tim Robbins, TV show, Wes Bentley

Welcome to Me

D: Shira Piven / 105m

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Wes Bentley, Linda Cardellini, Joan Cusack, Loretta Devine, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Thomas Mann, James Marsden, Tim Robbins, Alan Tudyk

Alice Klieg (Wiig) suffers from borderline personality disorder and lives off of benefits. She doesn’t have a job, but she is on medication and she sees a psychiatrist, Dr Daryl Moffet (Robbins). She plays the California state lottery each week; when she wins $86 million, Alice decides she wants to regain the life she had before she was diagnosed. She stops taking her medication and tells Dr Moffet that she no longer wishes to see him. She also moves out of her apartment and goes to stay in a casino hotel.

An avid TV watcher, Alice becomes enamoured of a show hosted by Gabe Ruskin (Bentley). She is in the audience one day when a volunteer is needed; Alice rushes to the stage. What follows attracts the attention of Gabe’s brother, Rich (Marsden), his producer and with Gabe co-owner of the production company that airs the show. Alice takes the opportunity to request a show of her own that she wants to call Welcome to Me. When she pays for a hundred two-hour shows upfront, Rich agrees to her suggestion – though the rest of the production team aren’t so sold on the idea. The first show airs and is a disaster, but instead of being put off, Alice invests more money into the show, thus making it look more professional.

She and Gabe begin a relationship, and the show slowly gains in popularity thanks to Alice’s confessional approach to the show’s content, and re-enactments of key scenes from her past. However, as she becomes more and more fixated on the show, her family and her closest friend, Gina (Cardellini) are largely forgotten about. She has a brief fling with a college reporter (Mann); when Gabe learns about it on one of Alice’s shows he’s visibly upset and angry. And when Alice accidentally spills hot chili on herself, burning her chest and upper arms, he reassessment of what the show needs leads to her carrying out live neutering of dogs and cats.

Things come to a head when Gabe quits and Rich learns that, thanks to Alice’s slanderous statements about people on her show, the company is facing a number of lawsuits. Rich confronts Alice live on air and tells her she needs to change her ideas about the show and fast. This causes Alice to halt the show and return to the casino hotel where in the days that follow she suffers a nervous breakdown. While she’s in hospital – and back on her medication – Alice begins to think of a way in which she can make it up to all the people she’s let down.

Welcome to Me - scene

Treading a very fine line between being sympathetic (mostly) and exploitative (occasionally), Welcome to Me is an odd movie that appears to go to some lengths to make its audience uncomfortable while watching it. We’ve had movies that feature characters with mental health problems many, many, many times before, but none that have placed them in a world where their private fantasies have been given such a free rein, and so easily.

The problem with the movie’s treatment of Alice is that it wants you to believe that she has a plan when in fact she really doesn’t. It also wants you to believe that a television production company would let Alice on the air without first vetting her and putting any relevant checks and balances in place. This isn’t public service broadcasting, and the speed and the convenience of Alice’s show hitting the airwaves (and making it onto the ratings) makes for an unconvincing development. And it’s during these segments that it becomes clear the script – by Eliot Laurence – doesn’t really know what to do with Alice, or how to explore the traumatic experiences that have triggered Alice’s disorder.

It’s a shame as it takes the edge off of Wiig’s inspired performance – possibly her best to date – and saddles the movie with several tiresome stretches that fail to engage as effectively as when the action happens away from the studio. Laurence and director Piven (sister of Jeremy, and wife of co-producer Adam McKay) invest a lot of time and effort in making Alice such a credible, fully believable character, and then place her in a milieu that doesn’t even bother to reflect on the vagaries of being a celebrity with mental health problems. It does touch on the way in which fame can isolate celebrities from the “normal” people around them, but in Alice’s case she’s already isolated, so where is the drama? And it doesn’t help that the characters surrounding Alice aren’t as sufficiently well drawn as she is, leaving cast members such as Marsden and Bentley struggling to make much of an impact (Marsden is particularly ill-served).

With all the focus and attention going on Alice, it’s to Wiig’s credit that she inhabits the role so completely and confidently that she carries the movie effortlessly, making up for the shortfall elsewhere. In fact, it’s such a strong, emotive performance that the movie loses its footing on the rare occasions she’s not on screen. Emotionally adrift yet  bound up in her own unresolved feelings of anger and rejection, Alice is a role that suits Wiig’s ability to “blank face” to a tee; you can see Alice looking out at you and seeing right through you at the same time.

Elsewhere, Clayton Hartley’s production design (reflecting the chaotic nature of Alice’s mind at home and in the studio), and David Robbins’ score (providing clever emotional cues for Alice’s behaviour) work to the movie’s advantage, while the script’s attempts at quirky, indie sensibility humour work with more of a success rate than the drama does.

Rating: 6/10 – a decent idea but lacking a through follow through, Welcome to Me ultimately has little to say about mental illness or the perils of being a modern day celebrity; relenting when it should be biting, this is saved (constantly) by Wiig’s ambitious and exhilarating performance.

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Mini-Review: Thanks for Sharing (2012)

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Addiction, Drama, Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Gad, Mark Ruffalo, Patrick Fugit, Pink, Relationships, Review, Sex addiction, Stuart Blumberg, Therapy, Tim Robbins

Thanks for Sharing

D: Stuart Blumberg / 112m

Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Gad, Joely Richardson, Patrick Fugit, Alecia Moore, Carol Kane, Emily Meade

Initial expectations or perceptions would peg this as a romantic comedy, but in actuality this is a low-key drama with comic highlights (mostly provided by Gad). Focusing on Adam (Ruffalo), five years sober as a sex addict, his sponsor Mike (Robbins), and newbie Neil (Gad), Thanks for Sharing follows each addict as he tries to rebuild a particular area of his life: Adam begins a new relationship with Phoebe (Paltrow), Mike has to deal with the return of his ex-junkie son Danny (Fugit), and Neil has to want to be honest with himself and others.

Thanks for Sharing - scene

 

The movie pitches its highs and lows effectively, even if there’s nothing particularly original on display here, and the different story lines are each given sufficient space to involve the audience and draw them in to each characters’ plight. Ultimately though, the movie lacks any appreciable depth, and what few dramatic moments there are have been done more persuasively elsewhere. That said, the script has some good one-liners and the cast does well with the material over all; Ruffalo and Paltrow have a definite chemistry together, and Moore (better known as the pop singer Pink) almost steals the movie. Blumberg’s direction is efficient without ever being spectacular, and the movie keeps the audience’s attention throughout thanks to the quality cast.

Rating: 6/10 – a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours but too lightweight to make more than a passing impression; a great cast let down by a script that needed more focus.

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