Jason Reitman’s Labor Day looks promising to an outsider – two strong leads in Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin would indicate a powerful back-and-forth in this tale of lost and found love.

But, while their strength holds up, Labor Day falls flat. Winslet plays Adele, a depressed single mom in the late 1980s, raising her son Henry and generally never leaving the house. While out shopping for new clothes for Henry, a strange and intimidating man named Frank (Brolin) all but threatens the two into taking him home where he can rest up his injured leg.

Surprise! Turns out he’s a convicted killer fresh off a prison escape and needs to lay low for the night.

As the story unfolds over a Labor Day weekend, we see the characters develop and grow, albeit a little too quickly in such a short amount of time with way too much melodrama for such a sappy plot. A spark lights anew in Adele’s eyes, and Frank plays Mr. Fix-it, slowly winning his way into Adele’s heart and stepping in as a father figure to Henry.

Visually, Reitman appeases us with beautiful warm autumn colors and slow, panning movements across suburban Massachusetts. Rolfe Kent composes the soundtrack, making this the fourth collaboration for him and Reitman: The others include Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air, and Young Adult.

The film is all well and good and a little too Harlequin romance novelesque. A tall, dark, and handsome man with a dangerous yet misunderstood past – a lonely, broken, aging woman who thought all had been lost. An impressionable boy just hitting puberty. You do the math: this one’s about the performances, not the story.

Winslet gives it her all as a depression-riddled mother, though at times the dreariness was just too much to take. Brolin is his usual Brolin self, his physical presence just enough to up the ante and compound his role as weekend stepdad. And Gattlin Griffith, who plays Henry, does a decent enough job to carry the movie along, but he’s nothing special just yet. Give him some time.

With supporting appearances from Tobey Maguire (who narrates), James Van der Beek, and Tom Lipinski (who bears a scary resemblance to a young Brolin – excellent casting) Labor Day rounds out well. Just don’t expect many emotional stirs or racy plotlines – we’ve seen it all before.

Grade: C

While the pacing is jarring and the plot packs plenty of holes, That Awkward Moment provides great bouts of laughter with an entertaining storyline focused on how men fear commitment. Jason (Zac Efron), Mikey (Michael B. Jordan) and Daniel (Miles Teller) are three friends in their 20’s living in New York City. Jason and Daniel design book covers and entertain a constant stream of women to keep them from settling down with a girlfriend (they call this rotation their “roster”) .  In contrast, Mikey is a married doctor. The movie begins with Mikey discovering that his wife has been sleeping with someone else and wants a divorce. Mikey is heartbroken but wants to make his relationship with his wife work.  Jason and Daniel decide to cheer Mikey up with a pact in which all of them will “avoid dating and spend awesome bro-time together for as long as possible.”

Naturally, they’re all soon secretly struggling with this pact. Jason soon meets Ellie (Imogen Poots), an endearing and witty book lover, in a bar. Daniel begins a relationship with his friend Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis), who for the former part of the movie plays his wingman.  Mikey attempts to put the spontaneity back in his relationship with his wife to prevent their divorce. While each in the trio find themselves falling in love, they each use the pact as a reason not to share their feelings with each other.

That Awkward Moment is all about the point every guy faces when he asks himself if this is the right time to let go of his old lifestyle and enter a relationship. The pact symbolizes this feeling of commitment-phobia these men face and addresses how each approach newfound feelings.  That Awkward Moment is a movie that you can watch with your friends or as a couple, and it succeeds at balancing comedy and romance to delivers a humorous experience that may surpass your expectations.

Grade:  B+

I haven’t had a chance to see Labor Day since the Telluride Film Festival but my affections for it still hold strong. It continues to be one of my favorite films from Telluride 2013 and was in my top 10 of last year. I absolutely adore Jason Reitman’s films, especially Up in the Air, which I saw three times in theaters. It has left me in tears many times, and I’m sure it will do so many more times. Clearly, I have a pro-Reitman bias. 

However, Labor Day is a very different film for Reitman. Rather than being sharp and quick-witted, it’s careful and considered. Before the Telluride screening, he introduced the film as a story about love, so I was shocked when the film began as a thriller in which an escaped convict kidnaps a single mother and her 12-year-old son. Although still as Reitman said, it’s a gentle, loving story.  Rather than following someone dodging police bullets or breaking into buildings, Reitman lets the camera calmly glide up streets and around trees in the quiet yet intense New England setting or watch three people bake a pie together.

The sincerity of Labor Day allows it to be about whatever you relate to. I latched onto the films ideas about parenting. The boy’s father is around once a week, but is not truly mindful and present with his son. Somehow this escaped convict comes into their lives, and touches both mother and son, because he truly pays attention to them. Only a great filmmaker can take a seemingly absurd premise and put the whole theater in tears. Reitman achieves this with grace, further revealing how exceptionally talented he is. 

Grade: A

At Middleton, the feature-length film debut of writer/director Adam Rodgers, stars Vera Farmiga and Andy Garcia as two parents who meet and fall in love while accompanying their respective children on a college campus tour. The film is an innocent and pleasant romantic comedy, but often falls victim to the clichés and shortcomings of its script.

The film follows the “opposites-attract” formula, as many movies of this genre do. Things don’t start out well between Edith (Farmiga) and George (Garcia)--he thinks she’s eccentric, and she thinks he’s uptight. But the two begin to bond when they are separated from the rest of their tour group and decide to embark on their own adventure, reliving their college years. Meanwhile, Edith’s ambitious daughter Audrey, who has her sights set on nothing but studying at Middleton under one of the nation’s most distinguished professors, is left to tour the school with George’s son Conrad, who is unwilling to even consider a school like Middleton. Neither George nor Edith is able to get through to the kids, but by the end of the day, Conrad and Audrey learn a life lesson or two from one another.

We find out early on that both Edith and George are married, but that their respective spouses could not be present for the campus tour. Beyond this, the movie really doesn’t tell us much else about them. Are they unhappy with their home lives? Why are they so quick to fall in love with someone else? If not for the brief mention of their absent spouses, I probably would have assumed both were single parents. Here, the film missed an opportunity to really flesh out and explore its lead characters. By the end, we know more about Audrey and Conrad, whose storylines are meant to be secondary to that of their parents.

Even though it’s often formulaic and rather forgettable, At Middleton is an enjoyable enough romantic comedy that comes in time for Valentine’s Day.

Grade: B

           

           

Brightest Star is the feature film debut of writer/director Maggie Kiley, based on her acclaimed 2009 short film Some Boys Don’t Leave. Chris Lowell stars as The Boy (we never learn his real name), a college graduate who has recently been left by Charlotte (Rose McIver), the girl he met in a college astronomy course and whom he thought to be the love of his life. Through flashbacks, we learn that Charlotte, who once dreamed of working in the arts, is pursuing a career in the business world. The Boy, meanwhile, is aimlessly waiting for something worthwhile to come along--but what is this worthwhile thing? The Boy has no idea.

After Charlotte leaves, The Boy cannot bring himself--literally--to get up off the floor and move on with his life. Finally, he decides that in order to win back Charlotte he will accept a corporate job from the kindly Mr. Markovic (Clark Gregg). While he’s happy to finally feel like a real adult, he doesn’t enjoy his work. The Boy wonders, “Why am I good at the things I don’t care about, and bad at the things I do care about?” He’s a natural at what he does, but finds it stifling and unfulfilling. As a result, he continues looking for something better. This is one of the film’s main themes, which I think rings particularly true for college students and recent grads--how do you know what it is you’re meant to do with your life? How far should you go in order to find out? Should you ever settle, for the sake of being practical?

The film offers no hard and fast answers to these questions, for us or for its protagonist. But The Boy doesn’t give up his hopes of finding something better. In the process, he meets The Astronomer (Allison Janney), who is able to help steer him in the right direction, even if it’s not quite where he had intended to go. By the film’s end, we get the sense that things are just beginning for The Boy.

Brightest Star is well-cast and the script is strong, with humor and clever dialogue adding lightheartedness to a film that raises some deep, even unanswerable, questions about life. Chris Lowell is believable--and very relatable--as the confused but well-intentioned Boy who just wants to do something meaningful with his life. Allison Janney, too, is perfect as the wise but rough-around-the-edges Astronomer with whom The Boy is finally able to connect.

With a running time of a mere 80 minutes, I do think there was room to explore The Boy’s journey a bit further. And the structure, which jumps back and forth in time as the story of the relationship between Charlotte and The Boy is told through flashbacks, is a bit unclear at times. But these flaws are ultimately forgivable, as the thought-provoking film explores the questions and ideas many of us have as we, like The Boy, seek our places in the world.

Grade: A -

There are many reasons I could love The Great Gatsby. I could love it because of the fact that the story is a brilliant deconstruction of the lifestyle and mindset of the American rich, specifically of the 1920s but also of today. Baz Luhrmann’s characteristic opulence and glamour, previously on display in Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, is sometimes condemned as being ridiculous and over-the-top, but I found it quite appropriate to this story by highlighting the luxury and absurdity of the era that F. Scott Fitzgerald was criticizing. However, this is not why I love The Great Gatsby.

It’s also special because of the music. Not only because of the high quality of the music, but the way it is used in the film. It’s one thing for a film to feature a song by Florence and + Machine; it’s a completely different thing to have Florence Welch croon a haunting serenade about being “over the love” and “letting the morning come” while Nick Carraway is waking up hungover from one of Gatsby’s parties the night before, the music mixed in such a way that it sounds like she is just sitting in the next room. Many films have theme songs or leitmotifs, but this film takes it to the next level, with Lana del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” being played at least half a dozen times, each with different tempo, instrumentation, and tone so that it fits the feel of each scene and still ties the story together as a whole. But, this is still not quite why I love The Great Gatsby.

I love The Great Gatsby because of the character Gatsby. As summed up by Nick at the start, “he was the single most hopeful person I’ve ever met, and am ever likely to meet again.” Gatsby is neither a hero, nor a villain; he is merely a tragic figure, in the tradition of Hamlet and Othello. He is a beautifully tragic hero, because of his flaw: he is loyal to Daisy to the absolute end, even to his death. This makes him an incredibly noble individual in his own way, but what’s sad is that his complete devotion to Daisy blinds him to the fact that in the end, despite all her beauty and kindness, she is not worth the undying loyalty he shows to her. In the end, the only thing wrong with Gatsby is that he loves too much. And Leonardo DiCaprio’s interpretation of Gatsby portrays this so well; you can feel his awkward nervousness before he is about to see Daisy for the first time in five years, you can see the love and longing in his eyes when he looks at her. Yes, the way he says “old sport” constantly gets a little irritating, but I think that is balanced out by the way he is able to so perfectly portray the beautifully tragic and hopeful man I came to love from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, a man so completely overwhelmed by love and dreams that it blinds him to everything else in the world, even his own life.

All in all, while not absolutely perfect (the first 45 minutes or so are a bit slow, I will admit), I believe Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation is a beautiful and (mostly) faithful adaption of what is in my opinion one of the best books of the 20th century. If you are not a fan of the book, then at the very least give this film a chance. Give Jay Gatsby a chance to tug at your heart with his hope and love. Who knows, perhaps you’ll come to believe in the Green Light, like Gatsby, and like me.

Grade: A

NUFEC writer Dan Simeone had the opportunity to meet producer Christine Vachon at an educational screening of Kill Your Darlings, the recent film in which Daniel Radcliffe stars as young Allen Ginsberg of the beat generation. With credits stretching back to the 1980s, Vachon has had quite the career. She was a co-producer on Kids, which NUFEC screened in the past, producer on Boys Don’t Cry, and producer on the recent Bob Dylan film I’m Not There. She has been nominated for two Primetime Emmy’s, nine Independent Sprit Awards (including one victory), two PGA awards, and won the National Board of Review’s Producers Award. She has worked with directors including Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz, Ethan Hawke, Robert Altman, and John Waters. Vachon is currently working on a new film with Todd Haynes called Carol, starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. 

Dan Simeone: What inspired you to be a producer?

Christine Vachon: I was inspired after having worked in many departments of production, and decided that producer was right for me.

DS: You work on a bunch of films each year. How do you choose what you'll work on and manage all that time?

CV: I decided what to work on based on if I could get financing for it and above the line actors, and director’s schedules. And I manage it, just like anyone in any other business, by calling people, taking meetings, etc.

DS: How did working on the set of Kill Your Darlings compare to other films?

CV: Working on the set of Kill Your Darlings was not different from others. Period pieces have their challenges, ambitious directors and not enough money.

DS: Why are you telling a beatnik story now? Were you inspired by other recent efforts like Howl, Big Sur, and On the Road? Why do you think the beats are such a hot topic right now in independent cinema?

CV: Beatniks have a timeliness to them. It’s like a pendulum, sometimes it’s up more than other times. Due Walter Salles’ unsuccessful film [On the Road, a recent adaptation of the beat classic novel of the same name starring Sam Riley, Garret Hedlun and Kristin Stewart], we had to make ours stand out and be different.

Stranger by the Lake left me stranded. While I had some connection to film, especially with supporting character Henri, I couldn’t quite grasp it.  It focuses on a lake in rural France that gay men use for “cruising”, a ritual of searching for casual sex partners.  Stranger by the Lake mainly follows Frank, who begins a dominantly sexual relationship with a rugged man named Michel. They never meet outside of the cruising lake and its nearby woods; in fact, the film never leaves this setting. Secondary to Frank’s sexual relationship with Michel is his friendship with the far more interesting Henri, who goes to the lake not for sex but for companionship. Henri’s loneliness and warmth are fascinating to observe in this setting. There’s also a murder sub-plot, which felt somewhat out of place, although I imagine it may grow on me with time.  

A general sense of confusion fills me when I think about Stranger by the Lake. What is this movie about and why are these scenes tied together? I’m still not quite sure, but reading an interview with writer/director Alain Guiraudie helped. He said that he “[created] sequences that combined the emotions of being in love with the obscenity of sex, without pitting the nobility of feelings on the one hand, against the trivial function of sex organs on the other." When reflecting on this, I can see the film’s strength in conveying the odd yet intense combination of passion and dispassion present in the cruising ritual, but I needed Guiraudie to help me get there.

Henri’s character helped me stay with the film, as it exposed the loneliness behind Frank’s actions. However mostly, I’m befuddled by the tedium of the film.  Ultimately, I recognize that there’s a depth to Stranger by the Lake that I’m blind to. I can hear it in Guiraudie’s words, and the exciting reactions from some critics, but it escapes me. If the subject matter sounds interesting to you, go for it. I hope you won't be left astray as I was. 

Grade: B-

I don't generally love or hate politicians. I'm very familiar with political figures and I follow the grotesque animal that is politics fairly closely, but I don't feel passionately for or against specific individuals. This certainly holds true for Mitt Romney; however, he is a character that I found particularly fascinating due to the unusual containment of his personality this past election cycle.

The new Netflix documentary Mitt, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week, follows Mitt Romney and his family from 2008, the last year of his first presidential campaign, until a couple days after he lost to Obama in 2012. The first third of the film focuses on the 2008 campaign, but the bulk focuses on Romney vs. Obama in 2012. Mitt is a personal portrait that’s surprisingly light and funny. My favorite moments have nothing to do with debates or political discussion, but rather Mitt’s family. We see Mitt Romney eat at Wendy’s for lunch, sleep on the floor of an airplane, and pray. I’m not usually comfortable watching religion, but the prayer scenes were quite special. I felt Mitt and his family’s sincerity and devotion. These scenes show the Romney family in a vulnerable, honest setting, and it is truly moving.

Mitt Romney is represented as a sweet, kind, and funny person. Mitt is essentially a dull, apolitical story about a nice person. It becomes fascinating because of its cultural context. Thus if you are like me, and follow the political process, it’s a rewarding intimate portrait of a former presidential candidate.

Unfortunately, a lack of access during crucial points in the 2012 campaign held the film back. We are exposed in great detail to certain events, like seeing Mitt’s notes from a debate with President Obama, but held back from others, like the selection of Paul Ryan as Vice President, which isn’t even mentioned. Not to mention that the film really loses steam after about 60 minutes, since there isn’t a clear trajectory. Nonetheless, the documentary was a compelling experience that I recommend to any political junkies who would like to Mitt Romney behind closed doors.

Grade: B+

The film premieres on Netflix tomorrow, 1/24, at 2pm.

Both when I attended the Telluride Film Festival this past August and now upon The Invisible Woman’s release, I’ve been surprised by the lack of discussion surrounding the film. It’s the second directorial effort from a famous actor, Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes, and takes an in-depth look at a famed author, Charles Dickens. How could such a film go relatively unnoticed? Now that I’ve seen the film, it’s clear why; The Invisible Woman is completely competent, but a bit dull.

I do not mean to lambast the film; a muted response is not a negative one. The Invisible Woman is elegantly crafted, with all artists in front of and behind the camera operating with excellence. Fiennes is outstanding as Dickens, and Felicity Jones (Like Crazy) is riveting as always playing his mistress, Nelly. The images presented are not that of a struggling amateur director, but one with a clear sense of cinema and visual storytelling. The cinematography is beautiful. Yet still, despite general excellence, it’s all pretty typical. They’re doing boring things, but they’re doing them really, really well.

The story focuses on Nelly, whose off-balance relationship with Dickens stirs contemplations of the repressed female. While Dickens may gallivant about as per usual, Nelly must hide and become invisible, as suggested by the title. While again intriguing, it ultimately has little to nothing new to add to these concepts.

The Invisible Woman is a perfectly competent period piece, which is worth seeing if the subject matter interests you, but the muted responses it continues to receive are well founded.

Grade: B-