April Movies

[osprey_archer]

I’ve already written about most of the movies I saw in April, but not all, and not necessarily because I didn’t love them: I adored Coco and now I super wish that I made it to the theater to see it when it came out, because the Land of the Dead is so big and lush and colorful and it must have been gorgeous on the big screen. A++ would recommend.

Continuing the animation theme, I saw Despicable Me 3. I loved the first Despicable Me and didn’t really like Despicable Me 2 (and haven’t seen Minions; there is probably such a thing as too much minions), and this one fell somewhere in between. It’s very funny - I particularly enjoyed the contrast between Gru and his twin brother (they were separated as babies in a Parent Trap type situation) - but it didn’t feel quite as tightly constructed as Despicable Me.

I felt pretty so-so about Penny Marshall’s Big, in which Tom Hanks plays a thirteen-year-old boy who has become thirty years old overnight. The way that he captures the body language of a young teen - there are moments when you can practically see a thirteen-year-old in Tom Hanks’ motions - is impressive. But the overall story felt very eighties and… I feel like I should have more sympathy/interest in the eighties, given that I was born then, but I don’t.

And finally - asakiyume and I enjoyed Rama Burshtein’s The Wedding Plan so much that we decided to watch her earlier movie, Fill the Void. Eighteen-year-old Shira is on the cusp of getting engaged when her older sister dies in childbirth, leaving behind a baby boy and a grieving widower. It’s important for him to get married again soon, and the matchmaker suggests a possible match… in Belgium, which would take him (and the new baby) far, far away from Shira’s family. Shira’s mother, devastated by the prospect of losing touch with the baby on top of losing her daughter, suggests another solution: why doesn’t Shira marry her sister’s widower?

As in The Wedding Plan, the window into Orthodox Jewish culture in Israel is fascinating. But unfortunately the fact that Fill the Void is an earlier effort really shows. The movie isn’t as self-assured as The Wedding Plan, and although Shira’s predicament is affecting, as a character she’s not as complex and contradictory (I mean this as a compliment) and finely drawn as Michal.

Comments

[sovay]

why doesn’t Shira marry her sister’s widower?

This is enough of a custom that it occured in my own family, in this country, where no one was Orthodox. My great-grandmother for whom I am named was one of four sisters; her two older sisters married two brothers of the same family. The second-oldest sister died following childbirth. The widowed brother remarried the youngest sister. (My great-grandmother in the meantime married a man from a completely different family, which is why we are literally the poor relations. Years later, after he had died and after the oldest sister had died, the family waited to see if she and her widowed brother-in-law would remarry and close the circuit, but they never did.)

[osprey_archer]

I'm sure there were solid reasons why the final sister and the widowed brother-in-law never wed, but all the same I am kind of weirdly sorry because that would just feel so satisfyingly complete.

[skygiants]

I have read so many takes on how horrifying Big is from the perspective of the other characters in the movie (his poor love interest, who got stuck with one of the worst romantic reveals in cinematic history! his POOR MOM!) that I now have very little impression of anything that actually happens in the story other than a vague sense of discomfort, despite having been a chorus member in a middle-school production.

[osprey_archer]

There are few movies that are more sneakily horrifying if you think about them for too long, and "too long" might be oh, ten seconds or so. That fortune teller is secretly evil, clearly.

You wonder how this warps the rest of his life, too. Everyone is going to expect him to come back from TRAUMA and TORMENT and he can't exactly tell them "No no, I was thirty and working at a toy company, and also I TOTALLY GOT LAID" so... where does he go from there?