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THE BOOKSHOP: SLOW GOING

Books Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
4905

If you enjoy watching Emily Mortimer at work, as I do, you’ll get something out of The Bookshop, but the film itself is an odd duck. Adapted from a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald by writer-director Isabel Coixet, it lays out its premise and likely outcome in its opening moments, through the words of an unidentified narrator. In other words, it introduces its setting (a small coastal village in East Angelia), time period (the late 1950s), and dramatic conflict, even its resolution. All that’s left is for the outline to be fleshed out as the story follows its preordained path to an unhappy ending. Mortimer plays a young widow who decides that her destiny is to open a bookstore and be surrounded by books. They take…

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LAUREL & HARDY BEHIND THE MIKE, TAKE TWO

Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
16799

I thought the book was closed (pun intended) on Laurel & Hardy’s radio career after super-collector John Tefteller produced an oversized book on the subject with a CD that compiled all surviving audio featuring the beloved comedy team. I wrote about it four years ago and now I have occasion to write again. LAUREL & HARDY: ON THE RADIO & ON THE PHONE Edited by John Tefteller; essays by Leonard Maltin, Michael Feinstein, Richard W. Bann, Randy Skretvedt, Kristina Polacek-Lang, George Mazzey (Tefteller Publishing.)   When John Tefteller discovered an original transcription disc of the duo’s pilot show for a half-hour NBC series built around their old-standby “Driver’s License” skit, L&H aficionados figured “that’s that.” Then performer and musicologist Michael Feinstein bought a collection of 16-inch…

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THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS: WHODUNIT…AND WHO CARES?

Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6720

As a lifelong Muppet fan, I root for anything the Jim Henson company turns its attention to, with or without the Muppets. Jim’s son Brian Henson directed this parody of hard-boiled film noir murder mysteries. Puppet characters interact with live actors like Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Joel McHale, and Elizabeth Banks. Someone is brutally murdering the stars of a 1980s TV kid show whose lives have gone sour, and no one knows why. The production is attributed to HA!, which stands for Henson Alternative. You can’t say they didn’t warn us. The Happytime Murders is awash in sex (of all kinds), violence, and a truckload of four-letter words. At first the shock value delivers some laughs but it doesn’t take long for the whole concept to go…

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INSPIRATION IN A NEIGHBORHOOD LANDMARK: RESTORING TOMORROW

Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
5340

Aaron Wolf grew up attending the historic Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. It had special meaning because his grandfather was one of the senior rabbis, filling the giant footsteps of Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the “rabbi to the stars.” That Hollywood connection is just one reason this saga is so compelling. The movie moguls of yore may not have been highly observant Jews but they cared about their reputations. Louis B. Mayer was an intimate of Magnin’s who helped fund the construction of the temple, while the Warner Bros. provided set designer Hugo Ballin to create massive murals perched just under the dome to impress worshippers below. They seemed solid from a distance but turn out to be facades—just like movie sets. We learn all…

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THE WIFE: GREAT ACTORS SAVE THE DAY

Film In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6648

Watching Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce is a treat, and the details in Björn Runge’s production are so convincing that it wasn’t until the film was over that I found myself pondering its credibility. That’s a credit to the actors and director but a failing in the story, which Jane Anderson adapted from Meg Wolitzer’s best-selling novel. Close plays the title character in The Wife, the saga of a venerated American novelist who wins a Nobel Prize for literature and travels to Stockholm to accept it along with his wife and malcontent son (Max Irons), who is also an aspiring author. The relationship between husband and wife is warm and loving but built on a house of cards, liable to collapse at any moment. Flashbacks…

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JULIET, NAKED: JUST THE TICKET FOR LATE SUMMER

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6088

Any film that opens with Chris O’Dowd talking directly to the camera is starting on the right foot as far as I’m concerned–I find his attitude and sense of off-kilter humor irresistible. In Juliet, Naked he plays a man who is obsessed with a onetime singer/songwriter who has long since disappeared. His entire existence is given over to pretentious babbling about Tucker Crowe for a small but fanatical fan base online. After fifteen years, his girlfriend (Rose Byrne) is at the end of her rope. She  questions their relationship and her very existence in a boring seaside village where she runs the historical museum she inherited from her father. One day she posts a response to one of her husband’s essays about a long-lost demo recording by…

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CRAZY RICH ASIANS: YET ANOTHER BREAKTHROUGH

Film Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
6805

It’s a bit unsettling to review a movie that has so much riding on it: its producers and studio (Warner Bros.) are eager to see if the Asian-American community—and moviegoers in general—will support Hollywood’s first major film in years with an all-Asian cast. What’s more, Crazy Rich Asians is a topical romantic comedy, not a look to the past like Memoirs of a Geisha or The Joy Luck Club. The movie bolts out of the starting gate with a lively title sequence designed by YU+Co., followed by the introduction of the main characters, who are irresistibly likable. Then the film backslides into romantic comedy clichés and soap-opera conflicts, especially involving a villainous mother-of-the groom and her endless machinations. (I’m told this was toned down from the novel!) I’m an admirer…

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