Month: November 2021

Waking up the morning after a party, two strangers find themselves in bed together and end up spending the rest of the day meandering around San Francisco together. It’s a bit of a more low-key, lower budget, modern city version of Before Sunrise. I had been curious about seeing Wyatt Cenac as an actor when this was first released and pushed it higher on my queue after seeing Barry Jenkins’s more recent efforts. It didn’t draw me in greatly, but I enjoyed the few moments where the city came across as a character itself and when it felt like the two main characters were making connections as people instead of actors just going through the motions. 

The three barely connected stories here were drawn from two separate short story collections. The first has Laura Dern as the lawyer for Jared Harris, a man who was injured on the job and unfortunately agreed to much less money than he deserved. The second focuses on Michelle Williams and her husband, who was having an affair with Laura Dern’s character in the first story. They are building a dream weekend home and convince dementia sufferer Rene Auberjonois to give/sell them sandstone he has stored on his land. The third involves two women, Kristen Stewart as a lawyer teaching an adult education class that lonely ranch hand Lily Gladstone stumbles upon. I’m not sure the decision on making them into one work here. One unifying theme does seem to be how women are often reached out to by lonely people for reassurance and connection, though in the last segment the roles were somewhat switched in that the main character was alone and looking for the connection.

It’s at this point that I might have to come to the conclusion that I’m not the audience for Sergio Leone’s films. Despite it’s length, I did enjoy Once Upon a Time in the West, but the combining two genres (gritty 1970s realism and Westerns) that I’m not a big fan of just isn’t a way to win my interest. In the early 1900s, Rod Steiger is a Mexican bandit who coerces Irish Revolutionary explosives expert James Coburn to join his gang, along the way he accidentally becomes a hero of the Revolution. The performances are strong and the two leads have good chemistry, but at its core it is dark and violent and a horribly cynical view of revolutions. 

I was pleasantly surprised with this made for TV movie about a woman’s experiences travelling with her family from Indiana to Kansas then on to Wyoming. William Shatner is her idiot husband who forces her family to leave their comfortable town life to move to the wilderness. He’s completely ill-prepared and leads them on one misadventure to another, angering various people along the way. Joanna Pettet plays the woman and the film is moved along by her diary narrations. It’s her strength that propels and even though they’re likely to die at the first winter (I’ve seen enough pioneering reality shows to have an idea of what a family of three needs to keep themselves fed and warm through the cold season), you still want to hold some hope for them. The film also features a very young Helen Hunt as the couple’s daughter who seems to have inherited her father’s idiocy.