Thighs Wide Shut

Vox Lux
A Star Is Mourn
Official Site | Trailers & Mo
R | 110 min

Brady Corbet (yes, that guy!) aims for the (pop) stars in his second feature Vox Lux, which is part masterful, and part questionable.  All in all, there’s a lot to take in, and a majority of the praiseworthy work belongs to Raffey Cassidy (and to Brady and cinematography by Lol Crawley for all those beautiful New York City building shots!!), who plays our fragile heroine Celeste in younger times, and then later on, when Natalie Portman portrays the older, crustier, unhinged version of Celeste, Raffey plays her daughter.  Confusing, a bit, and especially so when Portman enters the movie and acts like she’s doing one of those ‘silly’ an SNL raps, and a lot of the built up luster turns to bluster, but when the finale concert is staged, and the Sia songs blare, and the Mr Portman Benjamin Millepied dance move groove, they turn the beat around, and everything feels perfectly in sync

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Vox is currently sounding off in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

While We’re Young
Fountain of Youth Truths
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 97 min

Noah Baumbach cannot be stopped, and I hope he doesn’t, cause he keeps handing us charming little films that charm the little big pants off of us, and sometimes they make us cringe, but in the best possible way.  So what would happen if you took his gruff Ben Stiller Greenberg character, grounded him a bit more (but still let him be crazy after all these years), and then let his inner youth playfulness play out like France Ha?? I’ll tell – you get While We’re Young, which is like Girls, but with girls AND boys AND adults, and it’s like actually watchable (read – not horrible), and thensome and things!

Documentary filmmaker Stiller and producer wife Naomi Watts aren’t having a midlife crisis, but all their friends are having babies (including Ad-Rock Adam Horovitz!!!) and they aren’t, or doing much of anything, so they’re looking for something fun and new.  They find it in hipster extraordinaire couple Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried.  Driver wants to make docs like Stiller, and Darby makes ice cream.  Stiller and Watts eat them up, take them under their wings, but it’s really Driver and Seyfried who take the ‘older’ couple under their wings – introducing them to a world where bike riding with a dope hat, hip-hop dance classes, VHS movie watching, and tripping balls on ayahuasca are the new normal

Things go well, until, well, they don’t, and Stiller starts to see a rusty lining in his dip in the fountain of youth.  Join them + Charles Grodin, Brady Corbet and Ryan Serhant (perfectly playing a douche-wad just like himself) as they search for youthful truths, and adult realities

Oh, and nice Scott Rudin cameo there!!

Verdictgo: MOS DEF Jeepers Worth A Peepers

feel Young at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Melancholia
Let Nature Take Its Collision Course
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 136 min

What’s that in the sky?  Is it a bird? A plane?  No, it’s a mysterious blue planet colliding with ours!!!  WHAT!!!?!??!?!?!  Perish the pershing thought!  But would you expect anything less than a date with annihilation with our host being none other than Mr Slap-Happy Go-Lucky himself, Lars von Trier???  No, we wouldn’t, but after whatever the f%^k his Antichrist was (or wasn’t), we’re glad he’s putting us out of our miseries, and the results are sirprizngly not eye slitting out repoopulii!!!  Who knew that R.E.M. could get it so darn right when they said that they felt fine at the end of the world!!  It’s true, well, at least when watching it happen cinematically!

von Trier’s Melancholia starts with a masterfully artsy fartsy prelude bang (the sequence alone is worth the price of admission), and them calmly works its way backwards, 2 days before our time is up.  We meet blushing newlyweds Kirsten Dunst and Alexander SkarsgÃ¥rd, who are late to their own party, but with their perma-smiles & nuptial bliss in tow, no one is going to mind waiting hours for their arrival.  Once it all gets going, the reception is to die for (think this is how we’d all love ours to look like), but as the evening progresses, things start to unravel as we learn that nothing in this world can make Dunst happy, even on her most special of special days.  Her bleak mum (Charlotte Rampling), inebriated womanzing father (John Hurt), money matters brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland), pushy employer (Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd, shockingly NOT playing the father of the groom… his real life son Alexander), and even her hopeless wedding planner (Udo Kier!!!) are only making matters worse.  The ones trying to turn her frown upside down, newbie husband A SkarsgÃ¥rd, sister Charlotte Gainsbourg, and nephew Cameron Spurr, don’t have a chance on this planet of succeeding.  So where does Dunst, down in the dumps, go from here?

After a nice hot bath, urinating on a golf course, and a spontaneous encounter with Brady Corbet (the fake Michael Pitt), Dunst has fully come undone.  The wedding ends, and so does the marriage!  THAT WAS QUICK!!!  Once everyone leaves, grumpy Dunst grumps about with sister Charlotte, bro-in-law Kiefer, and nephew Cameron at their palatial castle and grounds (see ‘Castle-Free’ below). This is when all the planetary madness comes into play, and for once, Dunst starts to feel at peace (she even planet-tans in the nude at night!!!!!), while her sister starts to lose her shit, in her own way.  Dunst’s performance garnered all of the Cannes attention and awards, but it’s hactually Gainsbourg who has the more challenging, and rewarding role.  Maybe they should have been co-awarded, as two sides of the same coin, flipping the flip flip out

moral of the story: von Trier can create joy out of uncertainty and destruction, and this time he didn’t need to harm any penises in the process.  that in itself can be seen a success, and this might juss be his mos accessible movie to date.  Heil von Trier!!

Castle-Free: LvT made the heavens and earth collide at Tjolöholm Castle, Kungsbacka, Sweden

via this really cool site QOTS!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Mos Worth A Peepers

Melancholia explodes into limited release tomorrow, and is already available on-demand, but this is a theater movie people!!!

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Martha Marcy May Marlene
Cult of Lightening In A Fragile Bottle
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 120 min

Elizabeth Olsen is the unknown, and now known, sister of the Olsen twits.  Don’t know what she’s been doing all her life, but now she’s an actress, and from what we’ve seen of her in Sean Durkin‘s purty darn good Martha Marcy May Marlene, she definitely passes as an actress, and even more so than her sisters, who never really were actors to begin with, juss a set of twins who played a set of twins on a really dumb sitcom

In MMMMMmmmmmmMMmMmm, Liz doesn’t do much talking, but she does eat, and swim, and mope, and sometimes falsely smiles, and other times juss scares us with those blue-green Olsen dead eyes.  That’s what Olsen kin do best – they stare with those eyes, and creep us the creep creep out.  Liz as MMMmMMmmmMM does lots of staring cause she’s a lost soul stuck in the real world (at sis Sarah Paulson and bro-in-law Hugh Dancy‘s fancy dancy lake house) after running away from a cultish farm commune, which she kinda sorta not really wishes she never left, but of course is glad that she left (oh the contradiction!!!!)

She’s haunted by the past, going nowhere in the present, with not a very bright future ahead of her.  Blame the washing of her brain and private parts by the Jim Jones/David Koresh/Charles Mansonish dude played by John Hawkes (he has shady facial hair AND plays a guitar, so he muss be a cultish leader!!!!).  Now we loves ourselves some JHawkes, but he’s far too gentle of an actor to be seen as a lecherous misguided messiah.  Maybe that’s where faux-Michael Pittster Brady Corbet comes in, cause his eye starings are almos as creepy as Olsen’s is be!!!

Moral of the story?  Everyone with blue-ish eyes kinda creeps us out

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

MMMMMMMMM is currently mmmmmmmm good in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…