"Private Life", First Visit

Chris Feil wraps up his look at the films of Tamara Jenkins with her newest film, now on Netflix...

If The Savages was like Slums of Beverly Hills all grown up and disillusioned, Private Life is like Jenkins’ first two films in conversation, and it’s maybe her wisest. Here Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti play an intelligencia couple Rachel and Richard exhaustively exploring every avenue to conceive, with newcomer Kayli Carter as their young adoring niece Sadie naively slipping herself into their struggle. With this newest film, Jenkins casts her widest net of characters, all the more rewarding with the vulnerabilities of youth and middle age are in dialogue.

Jenkins chapters the film while still structuring it like messy memory, resembling a life so anxious it can only be delineated by doctor’s visits and holidays. At the point we meet them, Rachel and Richard exist in a flurry of procedures and hormonal upheaval to the point that it defines them. But despite pursuing all of their myriad expensive and physically taxing options to bring a child into their home, Private Life is really about coping with the waning amount of options life provides as we age.

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Yes No Maybe So x 4: The Mule, The Happy Prince, Mortal Engines, and Aquaman (again)

Let's get caught up on movie trailers. Clint Eastwood is dropping another December surprise, Rupert Everett reminds us that Bradley Cooper isn't the only actor stepping behind the camera, and there's always another would be franchise or two on the horizon. Four trailers after the jump starting with the Eastwood...

THE MULE

Yes - Very effective trailer opening with that car trunk mishap and the barking dog. Perhaps it's a bit vain, given that he is directing and starring, but we admire the honest of Clint only giving himself a solo title card at trailer's end despite major stars and cherished character actors supporting him (Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña, Dianne Weist, and Laurence Fishburne) since that's probably the truth of the movie. It'll live or die based on Clint's work behind and in front of the camera...

No - This isn't fair to the movie but I dont think I can take Clint Eastwood dashing lots of other people's Oscar dreams AGAIN with a sneak attack in the last two weeks of the year...

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Review: A Star is (re) Born

This piece was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. The movie was first screened at TIFF but he hopes to see it many times. 

Overnight success is a myth. Great artistic success in show business generally comes from working hard and learning the craft, often for years, so that you're ready should a big break ever come. 'Overnight'  is only just that moment when the world suddenly notices your long-standing gifts. A Star is Born as a franchise always synthesizes this myth and this truth for something like a fairy/cautionary tale; just as quickly as a star rises, a star can fall. Talent is never the question, but the starting point; whether the world notices and for how long, is out of your hands. The screenplay for the latest telling of A Star is Born, emphasizes this last point, as Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) urges Ally (Lady Gaga) to give it her all because the world might not always be listening. 

For those who've been living under a cultural rock the story of A Star is Born is ancient and simple: One already established successful showbiz man 'discovers' an absurdly gifted but basically unknown female performer and takes her under his wing. They fall in love but as her fame rises, his falls, plagued as he is by personal demons in liquid form. The story never has a happy ending so if you need a good cry, queue up...

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"I dont know. You erased me."

Coming Very Soon: Oscar Submissions "Burning" and "Border"

NYFF/TIFF screenings from Nathaniel R

"My what lovely posters!" he said, as he struggled to decide how to review two pictures that are best seen cold, knowing as little as possible. "But people don't buy tickets / get excited about movies without knowing something," he reasoned with himself about reviewing both South Korea and Sweden's Oscar submissions which are opening in US theaters very soon.

"Okay, okay," the purist in him, responded. "I'll say a little something about each but only if I can limit my discussion to the posters! People absolutely shouldn't watch the trailers." "Deal" his practical self muttered rolling his eyes, having been through this existential crisis of movie blogging numerous times. "Proceed..."

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