Review: "Monday"

Remember when Justin Timberlake was bringing sexy back? A lot of people wondered at the time exactly where it was that sexy supposedly went. Was there ever a time when sexy was really "out?" All I can say is for those of us who are sexy-deficient, "not sexy" has definitely never been in.

But the movies, or at least American ones, do seem to go through stages of prudishness interrupted by sudden returns to passionate, fleshy, plain ol' sexy filmmaking that feels like a lurch. "Monday" is certainly in that vein.

It's a bold, brash, diverting and yes, absolutely sexy movie starring Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough as an American couple who meet up in Greece and begin a torrid relationship. Gough's a bit of a cypher to most mainstream audiences, though they likely know Stan as Bucky Barnes from the Avengers movies, aka the current titular co-star of Disney+'s "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier."

If all you know of him is as a grim metal-armed assassin, then you've never seen Stan like this. Certainly, you've never seen as much of him as this. Gough is similarly unabashed.

Let's talk about nudity for a minute. For the prurient among you, I'll not be coy and confirm that in fact, yes, Little Sebastian does make an appearance, and not in the Ben Affleck "Gone Girl" way of bragging beforehand about showing your peen and then it's a three-quarter-turn-misty-shower-did-I-see-it-for-a-split-second-or-was-that-a-reflection-of-linoleum kinda deal.

I can't say as I have any particular enthusiasm for dicks on screen, but by God if you go around bragging about dropping trou then you damn well better whip it out with authority.

I also liked that Gough doesn't do that commonplace cringe-y movie thing of lying in bed after sex with the sheets primly pulled up to her chin. She just lets her boobs hang out, as actual women do. You stare at them for a few seconds, and if you're like me maybe take some pleasure from that, and then you forget about it and pay attention to what she's saying or expressing. 

Not showing the boobs makes such scenes more about the boobs than just saying, "Yep, here're my boobs."

The first half of the movie, directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos from a script he co-wrote with Rob Hayes, is a freewheeling blast. It's a display of sunshine, music, bare skin and a naked lack of inhibition.

Chloe (Gough) is an immigration attorney whose extended stay in Athens is coming to end along with her relationship with a wealthy businessman (Andreas Konstantinou) who turned out to be a heel. She literally bumps into Mickey (Stan) at a party where he's DJing, they're both pretty drunk, and wind up on the beach the next morning unencumbered by clothing.

There's a hilarious and saucy scene where they introduce each other in the back of a police car while wearing handcuffs. Even though there's no hanky-panky going on at this time, it's the sexiest scene in the backseat of a car I can recall since "No Way Out." (Another movie that heralded a brief return of sex to American cinema.)

You'd expect this to be a one-night fling for both of them, but Mickey makes a gallant display of pushing for something more, and Chloe takes him up on it. Soon they've moved in together and things start to get real, which is also unfortunately where the movie takes a sudden, sharp dip in energy.

It turns out they've both got the inevitable hangups. Chloe drinks more than she should and tends to make fatalistic decisions based on single incidents that may not be as big as she thinks. Mickey, though he works hard at playing the smiling carefree playboy, has a strong streak of self-loathing running through him. It's led him to walk away from life's opportunities and responsibilities.

He has a young son he rarely sees, even though he meticulously keeps a room ready for him at his place. And when an old band mate pops up after hitting it big (Dominique Tipper), he's tempted to return to the States with renewed creative passion.

Basically, the first part of the movie is the young, fun bit and the second half is where real life intrudes. I think it's important to the story that Chloe and Mickey are not supposed to be kids. I'd guess they're closer to 40 than 30. That colors their playful antics, which begin to run into dangerous territory, and might even be viewed as more pathetic than unbridled. 

Yorgos Pirpassopoulos plays Argyris, Mickey's best Greek friend and fellow hedonist. They do business together and play hard together, and it's hard to tell who is leading who astray. Not a whole lot of other characters clutter the background, though Mickey's ex (Elli Tringou) shows up for a confrontation with Chloe that doesn't go the way we think.

The title comes from a series of title cards that flash throughout the film, always stating "Friday." The implication is that these two people are living out a relationship that is a succession of hot weekends, and the chilly reality of Monday is just around the next turn.

I'm disappointed in where "Monday" wound up. I think the filmmakers had a very strong idea of how to portray the heaving beginnings of a love affair but were as clueless as their characters about how to sustain it through its proverbial middle age. 

People tend to think something's sexiest when it's new and fresh, but the bigger challenge is to keep fanning those flames, in movies or otherwise.

Review: "The Other Lamb"

He counts the days. He knows our private rhythms.
                                         --The Cursed Wife

The older wives know.

Oh, they'd never say anything to the younger women. The girls, the sisters, the ones in blue. For they know their future, because it is their past. And it is one they feel they can't escape.

That's perhaps the scariest thing about "The Other Lamb." It's a drama with horror elements about a cult led by a charismatic man known only as The Shepherd. He looks a lot like Jesus. He thinks he is Jesus.

Or, at least, he wants his "dear faithful flock," as he addresses them, to think he is godlike.

But the older women, his wives who wear red -- yes, wives, plural -- are fully aware of what's going on. Some of them are the same age as Shepherd, who is not old but is not young, and remember back to a time when he had a regular name like any other man. They know he is a miscreant running a long con. He says they are his followers, when in reality they are his coerced harem.

They know what happened to the babies who were boys, for in this flock there is only one ram.

But this has been their life for so long, something they chose, and they cannot see how to untie themselves from his web of deceit.

Some of them have been part of the flock long enough to have daughters now old enough to vie for a place as wives. There is a growing discord between the generations. Indeed, a few barely into their teens have already left behind the coarse blue frocks of the younger set for the deep red denoting one of the Shepherd's wives. There are at least half a dozen wives, and about twice that many in blue.

There are whispered tales of former wives, mothers now departed from the flock.

Among these is Selah (Raffey Cassidy), who's on the cusp of ripening womanhood. Her mother was one of Shepherd's favorites, as he frequently reminds her, stroking her deep auburn hair that flows in the same way. Shepherd commands his little cult through a set of invented rules, and one of them seems to be he will not take a new wife until she is blooded.

Selah is seen as the purest of the girls in blue, though the seeds of rebellion are planted in her heart. She watches the way the Shepherd manipulates the women and sets them against each other. One of her friends becomes a wife before her, and sits across from Selah at the campfire fire stroking her swelling belly, pride and boastfulness enflamed in her stare.

Where and when does this story take place? There's a dreamy, castaway quality to it.

Occasionally cars pass by letting us know there is some level of modernity around. Shepherd warns of the "outside world" constantly threatening to intrude and destroy their heaven on earth. When police drop by with a warning, the flock sets off by foot on a journey to find a new home, carrying only a few possessions and trailed by the small herd of sheep that sustains them -- the flock following the flock.

Denise Gough plays Sarah, aka the Cursed Wife. The Shepherd calls her a "broken thing" and eschews her. She has hastily shorn hair and scars on her body, and without saying a word we know where they come from. When Selah begins menstruating and is placed in isolation with Sarah, they form a kinship, with the older woman mentoring the younger.

This is a strange, moody and hauntingly beautiful film. Director Malgorzata Szumowska and screenwriter C.S. McMullen are less concerned with pushing a plot than moments of contemplation and quiet power. Some will find it rather slow-moving, as I occasionally did.

The visuals are magnificent. In their initial home in the forest, the flock has used strings of yarn to create outdoor spaces -- a cathedral-like roof, for instance. For group meetings and prayers, they have constructed a "room" making four walls out of the perfectly parallel strings. It's an oddly gorgeous and disquieting effect.

Cassidy does a lot with a mostly reactive role, her gaze transforming from innocence to recognition to resentment. We feel the power that Shepherd has over her and the others, and also her slowly germinating resolve to oppose him.

"The Other Lamb" is a story of faith, family and blood. Not all shepherds are goodly guides, and some sheep will not be corralled.

Review: "Colette"

At first blush “Colette” sounds like a retread of the recent wonderful film “The Wife” starring Glenn Close as the wife of a Nobel-winning author who (spoiler alert) actually wrote all of his books.

But in fact “Colette” is more or less the original tale of a long-suffering woman creating great art under her husband’s name, and is based on the historical early life of arguably France’s most celebrated female writer.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley) was a simple country girl who married a famous Parisian author some years her senior, Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), known by his pen name, Willy.

It may seem shocking to us that writing could be published under another person’s name, but as the film makes clear, it was common practice in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (And, as I can personally attest, it still is.)

Willy was a publisher himself who kept a stable of writers working feverishly to crank out stuff under the Willy brand -- generally salacious romances for high-society types. When their finances grow slim and he cannot afford to pay his ghost writers, Willy suggests that Gabrielle dash something off.

Her novel, “Claudine at School,” becomes an overnight sensation, detailing the lascivious thoughts and practices of a 15-year-old schoolgirl from provincial Burgundy. More books followed, chronicling the character’s rise to the Parisian salons and increasingly volatile romances. Willy and Colette become the toast of Paris, until the inevitable resentment over his assuming authorship of the books comes to loggerheads.

West is blowsy and self-pitying as the libertine Willy, suit vests barely able to contain an ample belly, a gray squiggle of goatee dancing off the end of his chin. He’s like a well-meaning but incorrigible walrus who always promises not to steal all the fish, but gives in to his appetites every time.

For him, this means basking in the attention of the French literary world, as well as the attendant feminine attention for a purveyor of socially acceptable smut.

At first decimated by his cheating, Gabrielle soon finds herself indulging her own romantic interests with other women -- with Willy’s blessing and urging. An early affair with a wealthy American socialite (Eleanor Tomlinson) becomes a public sensation, as both Gabrielle and Willy trade turns under her sheets. This provides more fodder for the next novel, of course.

This is where the movie is at its best, exploring how a provincial girl morphs into a worldly woman testing the boundaries of social constraint. Knightley -- who seems not to have aged a line since breaking out 15 years ago -- lets us feel Gabrielle’s surging passions and how they translated into art.

She and Willy enjoy a love/hate relationship, not exactly abusive but certainly controlling. He actually locks her in a room and forces her to write. As time goes on, she casts off more of his yoke, particularly via her long-term relationship with Mathilde de Morny (Denise Gough), a renowned noblewoman who dressed in suits and essentially lived as a man.

It’s almost as if Gabrielle dreamed up a parallel universe of affairs and scandal at Willy’s suggestion, and then they were determined to live out this shared fantasy.

The latter third of “Colette” loses a lot of narrative steam, eventually devolving into what seems like a series of naughty vignettes with little connective tissue between them. New lovers come and go like a theatrical parade.

Gabrielle’s marriage to Willy essentially dissolved over the course of some years, the rights to the Claudine books were sold off and she lived at a near-poverty level, subsisting as a stage actress. Her greatest works -- under her own byline -- came later, including “Gigi,” which had its own cinematic adaptation.

Director Wash Westmoreland (“Still Alice”), who wrote the screenplay with Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Richard Glatzer, struggles (as many filmmakers do) with folding the messy, chaotic ends of a real life into a 1¾-hour movie. The result is an engaging biopic that loses steam.

By the way, I promise you I wrote this review myself, and did not force my wife to do it. Although who knows? Maybe she could’ve done a better job.

Review: "Jimmy's Hall"

For a good chunk of the 20th century the worst thing you could accuse somebody of in the United States or United Kingdom was being a communist. Even today labels like "socialist" and "fascist" get tossed around much too easily, used more as ad hominem insults than descriptive labels.

James Gralton actually was a communist; he led the precursor to the Communist Party of Ireland during the 1930s and agitated openly for his views. You'd barely know it from "Jimmy's Hall," the new historical drama from director Ken Loach, who has essentially spent his entire career portraying the lives and struggles of the British working class ("The Wind That Shakes the Barley").

For the first 75 minutes or so, it's the story of a prodigal son (Barry Ward) who in 1932 has returned to his homeland from America to care for his ailing ma, and is cajoled by the local youth into reopening the local hall built a decade earlier on the family plot so they can have a place to dance and be carefree. Jimmy's Hall becomes a refuge from the squalor and subjugation that marks the lives of the common folk roundabouts Leitrim.

This development is received with much frowning and disapproval by the local parish priest and the town fathers, which escalates into harsh words, public shaming and eventually violence. It almost plays out like a period costume version of "Footloose," with the cool interloper fighting against the man so the kids can get their jitterbug on without being hassled.

The owlish priest, Father Sheridan (Jim Norton), comments to his young apprentice that this is how the commies get ahold of you: they start at the feet and work their way up to the head.

It's not until the last act that Jimmy finally climbs aboard a hay wagon and gives a fire 'n' brimstone speech about the earls keeping the little people under his thumb, letting the working man enjoy his spot of freedom, etc. And again, he has to be strong-armed by the locals to do it.

The screenplay by Paul Laverty, based on the play by Donal O'Kelly, plays fast and loose with the historical record, as such films are wont to do. In their vision the dilapidated hall is the repository of the agrarian soul, a sacred place where the Irish peasantry can play traditional music, dance a jig, learn songs in their native tongue and maybe have a boxing match or two.

It is, in a word, everything to them.

Ward is stolid and charismatic as Jimmy, in this telling more a ship tossed upon the waves of history than a captain steering a resolute course. Simone Kirby plays a long-lost love, now married off to another man but still pining for her wee rebel boy. They get to share a lovely moonlit dance, but their romance is kept in a corner.

The portrayal of the priest is more nuanced than you might think; he seems to genuinely care about the people and abhor violence. But, as Jimmy says, this church prefers its flock upon their knees.

As is his practice, Loach casts non-actors in a lot of the supporting roles, and it's a great treat to see real human faces in all their misshapen glory rather than Hollywood's usual parade of generic pretty people.

It's a moving story about injustice and intolerance, with the commies as the good guys and the clergy and landed gentry as the heavies. Which is just fine. I just wish "Jimmy's Hall" was a little more upfront about its namesake. If you're going to make a famous communist your hero, don't be shy about calling your hero a communist.