San Diego Reader July 21, 2016 69
Glamour and grime A
bsolutely Fabulous: The Movie — The early ’90s TV series about Edina Mon-
soon (Jennifer Saunders), Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), and the triumph of PR over reality gets a worthy cap- stone, full of gleeful amorality and two characters whose self-absorption reaches a sort of mystical apotheo- sis. Even in the narcissistic world of fashion, Eddie and Pats stand out, or sink below, or slither through to the front of the line. And the passing of years has only increased the need for denial, the devotion to ephemeral pleasures and privileges, the mirrorphilic care of the self at the expense of everything and everyone else. The resulting absurdity, which sends our heroines on the run to Cannes after they knock Kate Moss into the Thames, is not for all tastes. But it is very much for certain tastes. And it’s marvelously of-the-moment in its treatment of famewhoring dur- ing The Age of Internet. (You have to have a sharp point and thrust it hard to skewer the parody-proof cult of celebrity; AbFab just about manages it.)
— Matthew Lickona
Café Society — Woody Allen gives a tour of Woody Allenland, complete with gentle and largely unnecessary narration. Unnecessary for the movie, that is. But it’s just possible that this is something else: a primer of sorts, a re-introduction of the old guy’s schtick to a generation that’s only ever read about him in the tabloids. It’s all here: older men and younger women. The glamour and grime of Old Hollywood showbiz. Los An- geles vs. New York. Being Jewish, both religious and otherwise. Be- ing intellectual (“Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the examined life is no picnic”). Being good (or bad). The dubious possibility of getting what you want and holding on to your soul in the process. The sadness at the heart of life. The story concerns a young man (Jesse Eisenberg) setting out to make a life, and the girl (Kristen Stewart) he finds himself living for. It’s hand- some, and pleasant, and polished, and sedate. You won’t laugh or cry. You may, however, smile or sigh. — Matthew Lickona
Equals — It’s the Battle of the Fran- chise Superstars when X-Men’s Nicholas Hoult and Twilight’s Kristen
MOVIES
Stewart — both stretching to play physically perfect specimens — take turns commandeering soft-edged clo- seups in this dystopian dud. Director Drake Doremus (Like Crazy) has no idea how to establish an everyday universe, let alone create a stylisti- cally sound future. Windows take up half a wall of a workplace, yet in spite of the abundance of sunlight pour- ing through, characters operate in muted shadow. Salary demands being what they are, the produc-
ers couldn’t afford all three primary colors, so they settled on casting a Smurfy blue pall over their equally dolorous cast. A depthless subplot touching on a debilitating disease called S.O.S. (would you believe an acronym for Switched on Syndrome?) plays like an extended Cialis info- mercial. The DVD box should warn prospective buyers that its contents could cause drowsiness.
— Scott Marks
Ice Age: Collision Course — With each passing entry in the Ice Age franchise (this is number five), the gap between the anarchic joy of the brief bits featuring Scrat the Squir- rel and the plodding, on-the-trunk bulk of the film starring Manny the Mammoth & Family & Friends grows wider. (The image of a world-splitting fissure caused by the planting of a single acorn comes to mind, for some reason.) This time, Scrat is in space, having activated an icebound flying saucer, and the violence visited upon him by artificial gravity, teleporta- tion, et al. very nearly evokes the glory days of Wile E. Coyote. While he’s up there, he accidentally sends a doomsday meteor hurtling toward Earth, and Manny & Co. set out to stop it. But all the while, Dad is fret- ting over his darling daughter’s im- pending nuptials to a good-hearted goofball. There’s a moment of inter- est in a weasel’s paean of self-praise set to Figaro’s aria from The Barber of Seville, and grownups can pass the time puzzling over the various random anachronisms (“You look nothing like your profile picture!”) until Scrat shows up again. — Matthew Lickona
Life, Animated — Owen Susskind’s father feared that autism had “kid- napped” his son, until a viewing of The Little Mermaid caused the child to break a one year silence. An Alad- din puppet show soon followed —
Cafe Society: Woody Allen looks back on the glitz and glamour of Old Hollywood and all that jazz.
dad does a spot-on Gilbert Gottfried — in which father and son began conversing in “Disney dialogue.” Once the breakthrough moments be- gin to wear thin, there’s not much left besides a conventional documentary about a 23-year-old man with autism trying to leave the nest, overcome a busted romance, etc. It began feeling forced when Owen’s first night away from his parents was spent watching Bambi’s mom bite it, and pushed too far by having his first kiss punctuated with a cutaway to Aladdin getting to first base with Jasmine. Disney may have prepared children for many things, but sex wasn’t one of them. At one point, Owen’s older brother — named, ironically enough, Walt — breaches the subject of “Disney porn.” This no doubt accounted for the PG rating. Directed by Roger Ross Williams and featuring a cameo by Gilbert!
— Scott Marks
Microbe & Gasoline — Writer-direc- tor Michel Gondry mashes up a com- ing-of-age story and a road movie by sending his titular pair (one is small enough for his age to be mistaken for a girl, the other smells of his time spent tinkering with engines) off through the French countryside in a homemade house-on-wheels pow- ered by a two-stroke engine. (So it’s legal — sort of.) The artistic Microbe is the more miserable — besides be- ing deeply self-conscious, he’s in love (also lust) — but it’s the mechanical- minded new kid Gasoline who has the real problems: a former junkie of a brother off in the Army, a ter-
minally ill and congenitally nasty mom, and a father with no use for a son except to run errands. Still, he serves as the cheerful dispenser of adolescent wisdom for his mopey companion, until their journey takes a hard turn into unpleasant reality and the need to grow up a little sets in. Just a little, mind you — before and after, Gondry conveys a feeling of happy fantasy: two against the world, managing despite everything. — Matthew Lickona
Our Little Sister — At their estranged father’s funeral, the oldest of three sisters takes it upon herself to ask her little-known teenage half-sister — the product of an adulterous relationship that “crushed their family” — to join
her siblings and make it a quartet. Was the invite extended simply to spite their almost equally disunified mother? Audiences softened by Hol- lywood cynicism are bound to be confounded by filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda’s (After Life, Like Father, Like Son) gentle, upbeat tone. The direc- tor’s prime influence Yasujiro Ozu notwithstanding, it clearly doesn’t take a superhero to resolve life’s flow of contradictions, nor does our titular outcast in the sailor’s suit transform into a stringy-haired Japanese de- mon. Koreeda instead looks at what holds a family together long after the sands of time have filled in the emo- tional crater left by a messy divorce. And don’t expect a conventional sappy ending. If anything, the poster
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