Laggies

Lynn Shelton, 2014

IMDB

3/5

Laggies is an interesting film because it takes a completely unrealistic and far-fetched premise and puts it in the hand of a capable director in Lynn Shelton. There are so many reasons that a film like this should not be good. We've seen similar movies before, a lead character going through some form of mid-life crisis and buddies up with a young person to try and relive their youth. Big did it well, conversely. Billy Madison showed us the humor in the immature adult spending lots of time with kids in a more slapstick fashion. Lost in Translation artfully showed an unusual relationship between a senior(ish) male and twenty-something female. In tone Laggies could be compared to Crazy Stupid Love in the sense that it's a somewhat chaotic story with a blend of love and friendship between three people that extends to more than three people.

Adulthood seems to hit Megan (Knightley) all at once. She's thrown into a bachelorette party where her career goals are immediately under examination. Flash to the wedding where she is not only under pressure to perform horribly garish tasks for the bride but she is put under pressure by her boyfriend and then close friends. And of course the pressure on her only piles up from there, giving her no choice but to drive away from it all. Of course you are sympathetic for Megan and don't blame her for running away from a situation that would really never happen in real life. Stresses that you are confronted with over the course of a few years suddenly hit Megan in what seems like twenty minutes! That's basically the way the movie goes. A bunch of situations that wouldn't ever really happen, but you somehow remain engaged. This is probably because Laggies makes better decisions than similarly-themed Young Adult by pumping more emotion into the story. Theron's character in Young Adult was selfish and unapologetic, while Megan is charming and innocent. The film just wouldn't have been able to stay interesting without the performances by Knightley, Chloe Grace Moretz and Sam Rockwell. The level of undeniable talent between those three is enough fuel to carry this ridiculous story to the actually-quite-satisfying end.

Enough Said

Nicole Holofcener

Can I Stream It?

3/5

Enough said doesnt do what a lot of modern Romantic Dramedies do in taking two mid-tier actors and confronting them with a far fetched premise. Instead here they take two great performers who have good on-screen chemistry and give them a far fetched premise. In a sense its like the best Meg Ryan movie shes never been in. The late great Gandolfini plays a version of his alternate dimension amazingly compelling story-thread guy Kevin Finnerty from the immortal Sopranos with his Albert character. He displays his range, and for the most part you never really feel like he is going to get physically threatening. This goes against the notion that after Sopranos he would forever be type-cast as the mob-boss with mommy issues (wow that is a wicked generalization isn't it?). It was ultimately unfair to typecast Gandolfini because he really did have a lot of other weapons in his arsenal. He brought the threatening force in films like True Romance or Killing Them Softly but then he would bring deliver more subdued but more elaborate characters in Where the Wild Things Are and Zero Dark Thirty. Here he is a man still exhausted from a toxic marriage. He is more than ready to move on and put the past nightmare behind him. It's really his wife who continues to beat his idiosyncrasies into the ground, without him there. Sometimes it almost feels like she's still married to him, but a ghost of him, after he's eagerly moved on with the next chapter of his life (not looking back either) and is no longer a physical presence in the house. The one thing that brings the two of them together is the fact that they are both at the same point in their lives: divorced, cynical, and raising college-aged kids.

Julia Louis-Dreyfuses character Eva is a bit more challenging. She has a healthier relationship with her ex, who has his own HBO background with the much short-lived forgotten-but-great Carnivale. But her relationship with her daughter Ellen (Tracey Fairaway) is befuddling and not really well laid-out. You know that there is tension between the two, and then there's a leap to Eva spending more time with Ellen's best friend. There isn't a lot in between that. And there probably should be. But at the end of the day, it's excusable and not really that important. What's more important is the chemistry between Eva and Albert feels real. It's a nice send-off for Gandolfini, even if it's not his last film (two more in post-production as of June of 2014). 

Before Midnight

Richard Linklater, 2013

Can I Stream It?

4/5

WARNING: If you haven't seen the previous two Before films, you'd be doing yourself a favor if you didn't read on. Please watch Before Sunrise and Before Sunset first, and then please come back!