To paraphrase John Oliver on Last Week Tonight: just time for a quick recap of these movies I've seen recently
The Skeleton Twins
As far as I'm concerned, low-key dramedy The Skeleton Twins serves one major purpose: to highlight Bill Hader's gifts as an actor. Between his role here as depressed, gay, 30-something Milo and his role as the romantic lead in Trainwreck, Hader is killing it in his post-Saturday Night Live career.
As Milo attempts suicide in the opening scene, his estranged twin sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig, not very impressive in this role) is also contemplating suicide miles away. As she stares down at a handful of pills, she's get a phone call informing her that her brother is in the hospital. The twins are thrown back into each others' lives and gradually realize that maybe a lot of their problems in life have been caused by their estrangement.Luke Wilson costars as Maggie's extremely nice doofus of a husband, and he's great in the role, but The Skeleton Twins is ultimately Hader's show.
Grade: B
***
Obvious Child
Obvious Child isn't all that different from The Skeleton Twins in its low-key, slice-of-life plot, only where Twins begins with a suicide attempt, Child ends with an abortion. Starring comedian Jenny Slate, Obvious Child has been called the 'abortion rom-com', but that's a bit of a misnomer since the abortion doesn't play a huge role in the film--it happens at the end, almost as an afterthought, which is precisely the intention of the filmmakers; i.e. to present a woman getting an abortion as NDB.
Slate plays Donna, whose boyfriend of many years dumps her. She goes to a bar and has drunken rebound sex with a random dude named Max (like ya do) who turns out to be a really nice person who actually wants to date her. Most of the movie is Max (Jake Lacey) trying to convince Donna to go out with him. Oh, she also gets preggers from that hook-up, which complicates matter.
I liked Obvious Child a lot, but it wasn't quite as good as I had been promised by the feminist blog-o-sphere. I think they were just happy to see abortion portrayed as not an insane tragedy. And it does in fact accomplish that goal.
Grade: B
***
Enemy
Ugh. The Redbox description of director Denis Villeneuve's film Enemy calls it an "erotic thriller". I wish! Instead, this arthouse film, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (the sole reason I rented it) is an abstruse, confusing mess. Gyllenhaal plays a college professor who winds up meeting a man who looks exactly like him (also played by Gyllenhaal). He attempts to unravel the mystery: are they twins separated at birth? Two versions of the same man living in alternate universes? Beats me. We never get a straight answer and it's very annoying. This is the second film of Villeneuve's I've seen and not enjoyed (I wasn't crazy about Prisoners).
Grade: C-
***
Sleeping Beauty
This ain't your grandmother's fairy tale. Sleeping Beauty (2011) stars waifish Emily Browning as cash-strapped college student Lucy who takes a job providing erotic companionship to rich, old men. No, she's not a prostitute--she never has sex with these men. Instead, Lucy allows herself to be drugged into a deep sleep and then put into a bed where these old pervs can come in and do almost anything they want to except penetrate her or leave marks.
The film, directed by author Julia Leigh is very beautiful, but only "erotic" in the way films like Belle de Jour and Eyes Wide Shut are. That is to say, not at all. There's no heat, only chill. One assumes that there's a deeper point the director is trying to make here--perhaps that men prefer women young, beautiful, and comatose--but when the movie is over you may scratch your head and say "what was the point?"
Grade: B-
***
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Directed by Alex Gibney and based on the thoroughly researched book by Lawrence Wring, Going Clear takes a deep dive into Scientology: what it is, what its followers believe, how it started, and what convinces people to stay in it. Gibney and Wright take a firm stance against Scientology, particularly for its abusive tactics (especially towards "Sea Org", aka the closest thing Scientology has to a clergy) and extreme wealth hoarding (since it's technically a "religion", Scientology churches are tax exempt).
The best part of Going Clear are the candid interviews with former members, such as director Paul Haggis. Their willingness to be forthright to the point of admitting that they were sucked into a cult gives the film both its emotional heart (Haggis left in part because Scientology is still pretty anti-gay and he has two gay daughters) and its credibility.
Beware: watching Going Clear will make you question your own religion, political, and social beliefs in that you'll start to see group think patterns (in less extreme forms than in Scientology) everywhere.
Grade: A
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