After filming novelist Denis Lahane's Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck returns to his homeground of Boston with the same local writer's Live By Night. A fairly flimsy and superficial 1920's gangster movie with plenty to enjoy if you leave your brain at home. Director (and lead) Affleck is far better with his intelligent movies. This is all very much predictable but somehow quite exciting. It looked very good too.
Now Lion is an intelligent movie. The first part has little dialogue but is totally gripping as the very young Saroo is lost in Calcutta. There is much you understand without being told a thing about what is going on. Director Garth Davis is to be congratulated for not spelling out what we can see for ourselves. Saroo carrying his piece of cardboard around the city is a stroke of genius. The second part is a strange contrast with the grown up Saroo with his foster family in Tasmania. Nicole Kidman has never been better as his new mother. I just wasn't sure that the casting of Dev Patel was a success.
La La Land was not the five star movie I was hoping for. All the rave reviews about the opening number were squashed by hardly hearing a word of the lyrics. Or was that just my cinema's sound? The script was, for me, flawed in one major aspect. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) had an interesting story, a jazz pianist sacrificing his talent for different mainstream employments. But Mia (Emma Stone) had to rely on a never ending series of rejections that, for the first two thirds of the film felt tiresome.
However, the movie did have loads of charm, and I laughed or smiled a lot. Although the contrasting sad bits fell flat. There is one classic scene that goes into my top ten of movie moments. Mia arrives at an outdoor party only to find there is Sebastian playing keys in a pop group. Their reactions are wonderful. Take On Me was a great choice, it has always been my favourite pop video. All my best moments in movies seem to revolve around such a song. So, all in all, a decent enough homage to old Hollywood musicals, and the modern feel was spot on. But what was the ending all about?
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