Writer-director David O. Russell has a remarkable string of successes in the past five years, winning three Best Director and two Screenplay Oscar nominations for his most recent trio of films The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle.All earned Oscar Best Picture nominations as well. His latest, Joy,is a slight departure, as it is the first time he has presented a woman at the center of one of his movies. It makes this film — the third collaboration between star Jennifer Lawrenceand the director — not only a welcome respite from all the blood and guts male-oriented movies headed our way on Christmas Day but also an enormously effective story of female empowerment, family and success against all odds. In a time when it is most needed, the aptly titled Joy makes you feel good about life and its possibilities.
As I say in my video review (click the link above to watch), this is perhaps the first time we have seen such a full-bodied, strongly grounded and determined performance from Lawrence, and she runs with it. She is simply sensational, even eclipsing her Oscar-winning turn inSilver Linings Playbook. It is the kind of dream role women don’t often get these days particularly from major studio movies, which tend to be more male-oriented, and it should put her right back in the center of another Oscar run.
The movie centers on a woman with a dream, and it actually spans four decades in the life of Joy Mangano. This is inspired and based on her true story and real events, though Russell would be first to admit it is not a straight biopic even though the most incredible parts of it are things he didn’t have to make up. What the director — who wrote the script from a story by him and Annie Mumolo — does is get right to the essence and truth even if at times liberties are taken for dramatic purposes.
The bulk of the film is set in the early ’90s as nascent inventor Mangano, frustrated with using ordinary mops of the time in her own life, comes up with a plastic one made up of 300 feet of cotton that can be wrung out without getting your hands wet. Although rejected by just about everyone she takes it to, Mangano discovers the opportunity to sell it on TV just at the time home shopping network QVC is taking off. She takes it to Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), who runs the new network, and he gives her a shot. After a bad run she convinces him to let her sell it herself and her life begins to transform.
As in any Russell movie, this is just a part of what it is really all about, as this is a story that revolves around family — many of them eccentric in their own ways — and how this very forgiving person navigates the people in her life and her own dreams. Also like other Russell films it is a true actors showcase, and he writes women just as well as he writes men. But this is in part a crackerjack story about female empowerment and never giving up, so the emphasis is on that with a sensational group of actresses playing an eclectic group of women including Elisabeth Rohm as Joy’s envious sister Peggy, who lives in her shadow; Virginia Madsen as her soap opera-addicted mother Terry (there are great soap opera star cameos in the film from the likes of Susan Lucci and Donna Mills); and the wonderful Diane Ladd as her supportive grandmother Mimi. Dascha Polanco of Orange Is The New Black effectively plays Joy’s best friend, Jackie. And I was really taken with Isabella Rossellini as Trudi, girlfriend to Joy’s father (Robert De Niro), who becomes the key financial backer for Joy’s business venture. Rossellini is not seen often enough these days on the big screen and she steals every scene she’s in.
There is a fine group of male actors as well including Edgar Ramirez who plays Tony, Joy’s ex-husband but now friend and business associate who lives in the basement with her not-so-responsible but well-meaning father Rudy (another fine turn fromSilver Linings co-star De Niro). The whole idea of a divorced couple who still have a decent relationship and love for each other — even if its not romantic love — is rarely explored in movies, and Lawrence and Ramirez have great chemistry. Cooper is again terrific as the QVC head who gives her a shot and then finds himself just trying to keep up with her. In the QVC section, some of the best scenes in the film, there is a fun cameo from Melissa Rivers playing her own QVC celebrity seller mother Joan Rivers. It is inspired casting indeed, as is Dreena De Niro as the QVC host.
If you are looking for a great human story this season look no further than Joy, one of the year’s most enriching and entertaining films, a throwback in many ways to kind of movies studios turned out in the ’40s and ’50s when big female stars really held court. This is a must-see if you care at all about movies that feature real people you can root for.
Producers are John Davis, Jonathan Gordon, Ken Mok, Megan Ellison and Russell for the film, which is being released Christmas Day by 20th Century Fox. Do you plan to see Joy? Let us know what you think.
Che di lynchiano, essendo tale questo mio/nostro/vostro sito, il trailer di Joy (lo) avesse tanto, era fuori discussione.
Intanto, le prime reviews americane si stan, come sovente accade per i grandi film, spaccando a metà tra favorable e negativi/e.
Ma QUI, non solo estrapolando, ma acchiappando tutto il pezzone, ne van fieri, e non solo di Jennifer Lawrence & del suo director.
Robbie Collin
Jennifer Lawrence hasn’t won an Oscar for reading aloud from the phone book just yet, but she may be about to be nominated for selling a mop. There’s a scene in the middle of Joy, Lawrence’s third and latest film with David O. Russell – a biopic of Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop – in which Joy finds herself in front of the cameras on the QVC Shopping Network, clutching a plastic floor-scrubbing device of her own invention.
The name Miracle Mop is well-chosen. Joy’s entire life, let alone her linoleum, is sorely in need of divine intervention. Rudy (Robert De Niro), her exasperating father, has recently moved into her basement, after being dumped on the doorstep by his ex-partner like a malfunctioning washing machine. Her mother Carrie (Virginia Madsen), a kind of lace-edged satin pillowcase in human form, is horrified – as is Joy’s buffoonishly useless ex-husband Tony (Édgar Ramírez), who for the past two years has been very contentedly living in the basement by himself.
Inspiration for the Miracle Mop doesn’t so much strike as dawn – the first rays piercing the clouds when Joy is, as usual, cleaning up after this trio of adult children (this time, a couple of broken glassfuls of red wine, sloshed across the deck of her father’s new girlfriend’s boat: Joy’s three actual children are as good as gold by comparison).
As she wrings out the mop-head by hand, she looks down at her palms, pierced by glass and spotted with blooms of blood, and realises things have to change. In the long term, the answer is adequate support from her family, and acknowledgement of her impossible workload. But in the meantime, a mop that could squeeze itself out would be great.
Fast-forward to the present, and bang. This is the flashpoint, to quote Bradley Cooper’s mustard-jacketed QVC executive, who’s hovering on the sidelines, at which “the ordinary meets the extraordinary” – where a dirty mop-head has the power to wring itself, and Joy’s similarly grimy existence starts to turn itself inside out. Caught in the glare of the studio lights, she fumbles to find the right words.
But soon, that miraculous mop-head is gliding across the floor, and the sales lines start to ring. For the first time in the 17 years since her parents divorced, Joy feels successful – and with that success comes a rush of vindication so heady it prickles in your eyes like electricity. Lawrence is wiping up chocolate syrup and baby food, and it’s laugh-out-loud-ridiculously moving.
Since Joy is a David O. Russell film, the presence of a) Lawrence and b) bizarre, fizz-popping explosions of catharsis are to be expected. But the ringmaster of The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle seems to have mellowed a little, which means fewer outright belly laughs, but a more layered and involving emotional landscape. (Though there are still some yelp-out-loud moments in Russell’s script – not least of all De Niro’s description of his ex-wife as “like a gas leak: we don’t see you, we don’t smell you, but you’re killing us all silently”, and a bizarre soap opera, all paste diamonds and plywood walls, that’s constantly on televisions, as if it’s being broadcast live around the clock.)
Russell is no stranger to using the extended family unit as a prefabricated framework for rackety screwball mayhem – the technique gave The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook their most robustly enjoyable scenes, and here, he also puts it to expert use. Joy’s household is always full of faces: in addition to her parents, ex-husband and children, her envious half-sister Peggy (Elizabeth Röhm), her supportive grandmother (a superb, tremulously beautiful Diane Ladd, who also narrates), her best friend Jackie (Dascha Polanko), her father’s girlfriend and Miracle Mop’s main investor Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), and even a friendly Haitian plumber (Jimmy Jean-Louis) always seem to be around, as if they’ve just come tumbling out of the hallway cupboard.
But it’s Lawrence’s liaison with the beautifully on-form Cooper that stay with you most – not because their relationship is all that romantic (in fact it’s largely professional), but because it brings a counterintuitive dignity and grace to what on the face of things seems to be a throwaway, eccentric tale.
Though he works for a cable TV shopping channel, Cooper’s character comports himself like a Golden Age Hollywood filmmaker – rhapsodising about old-school studio heads Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck, and passionately urging his cameras mid-broadcast to “give me the hands” and “cut to the syrup”.
He likens his and Joy’s meeting to the moment the great director David O. Selznick met Jennifer Jones, a former hat model whose collaborations with Selznick made her a star of Classical Hollywood cinema – and Russell is drawing an additional, impertinent but irresistible parallel with his and Lawrence’s own creative alliance.
While the Golden Age may be long gone, its spirit endures in Joy. It’s the best kind of actor-director collaboration. Take the sum of its parts, double it, and you’re almost there.
Heist, da noi “internazionalmente”, molto probabilmente, Bus 657, titolo originale/rio.
Heist, titolo invece oramai “collaudato” per la distribuzione nordamericana, da non confondere con l’omonimo di un decennio orsono con Gene Hackman e Danny DeVito, che portava la firma registica più blasonata dell’egregio David Mamet.
Qui, a dirigere l’action ci pensa il “misconosciuto” Scott Mann, a sua volta da non confondere col ben più estroso, affermato e indiscutibile Michael “Heat” Mann, appunto, anche perché i “due” non hanno neppure vicendevoli rapporti di alcuna parentela.
Partiamo dunque col dire che Heist, da circa due settimane disponibile on demand e in pochi, “selezionati” theaters statunitensi, par(t)e “giustamente” con “basse” aspettative da straight to video e non ambisce né mai ambirà a divenire un capostipite memorabile del genere neo-noir.
Si tratta di un godibile thrillerino “scopiazza-tutto”-sparatutto, però, ben fatto e “lucidato” da una fotografia “ocra-nostalgicamente eighties fascinosa” di form(ul)a rétro, vintage, e chi più, di “anticamente” anacronistico con termini aggettivali può metterne, come naïf… in fatto di Cinema d’una volta, può (dis)farlo.
Non ha pretese né ambizioni particolarmente autoriali se non di cercare di soddisfare un gusto per l’entertainment oramai, come accennato sopra, già “andato”, sorpassato, appartenente a due decadi circa fa.
Cast non disprezzabile col De Niro imparruccato, laccato e tinto, The Pope, che fuma sigarette “al vapore” assieme alla bella donzella Summer Altice, una delle tante sue puttanelle di lusso e lussuria, su un casinò stazionante-galleggiante sopra un “laghetto marino” che pare una nave appunto vaporetto, chiamata/o elegantemente “Il Cigno”.
Gli incassi ci sono, vanno “a gonfie vele”, si celebrano anche gli anniversari di tanto s(ucc)esso, c’è però proprio un però che scombina il “piano regolatore” dei giocatori da parte di un croupier (Jeffrey Dean Morgan smagrito ma di gran carisma) addetto anche al “servizio pulizie”. La sua bambina è profondamente malata e giace in attesa della tristissima prematura morte su un letto d’ospedale del reparto-infanzia già “morta” sul nascere.
Come si sa, in America, le cure si pagan da sé e neanche la “riforma” Obama ha cambiato tanto le cose.
Il padre non ci sta a perdere… la sua figlia tanto adorata, sangue della sua vita un po’ sfigata da “commesso viaggiatore”. Allorché, deve organizzarsi per racimolare la cifra di soldini necessaria per salvarla.
Ebbene, “niente di meglio” che farsi venire la “brillante” idea di svaligiare il casinò del suo capo(ccia).
Ma vi va coi piedi di piombo, a parte le pallottole che vedremo, a raffica, scoppiettare dopo.
Vuol parlare prima con De Niro/Pope per spiegargli il problema e chiedergli una sorta di prestito “bancario”.
Ma Pope rifiuta di netto e lo caccia in malo modo da “vero” strozzino e stronzo.
Vaughn/Morgan dunque assolda un manipolo di suoi “amichetti” per mettere in pratica il furto. Notturno. Ruba i tre milioni di dollari che servono per il “salvataggio” del suo sangue “trasfuso” nell’amor non solo di padre e “dirotta” un pullman per sbarcare chissà dove col malloppo, infatti, non lo sa neppure lui. Come volevasi (non) dimostrare, presto il piano va a monte, la polizi(ott)a, che diverrà sua “complice” per meriti suoi “umanitari” e per la “giusta causa” da sostenere, gli sta alle calcagna ma gli regge anche il gioco, perché Vaughn non è un criminale, è solo un disperato in cerca di speranza.
I passeggeri del bus, presi in ostaggio, non vengono infatti uccisi, incolumi sono quasi protetti da quest’Inside Man sulla vettura “speed”.
Un film(etto) che può assomigliare anche al washingtoniano John Q.
C’è un cattivo, più di uno, il braccio destro di Pope è un ne(g)ro troppo “incazzoso”, e non manca la redentrice sorpresona (del) finale.
Un b movie onesto, passabile, da voto 7 per il coraggio di esser ancora Cinema d’un tempo oramai “superato”.
D’altronde, anch’io l’ho (già) (ri)visto in streaming, roba che una volta non c’era.
Brian De Palma has been tapped to direct Lights Out, an action-thriller from Arclight Films and China-based Huace Pictures that marks the first project run through Arclighta and Huace Media Group’s Aurora Alliance Films joint venture. Preproduction is underway on the pic, which centers on a blind Chinese girl unknowingly caught in a plot to expose a top-secret assassination program, and who raises unsettling questions about government secrecy and what can and can’t be seen. Arclight Films is handling international sales at AFM.
Un nome altisonante, altissimo che DEVE tornare a far Grande Cinema con la G e C maiuscole.
La storia è voyeuristica quanto da Brian ci si aspetti. Il rapimento di una sconosciuta, non famosa ragazza cinese cieca, catturata per esporre, diciamo, e scoprire un complotto assassino, che diverrà, suo malgrado (?) una perfetta eroina per i decenni a venire, rivelando quanto di top secret e marcio vi è nel nostro Pianeta Terra(gno).
Eyes wide shut, molto kubrickiano, sempre Hitchcock ad occhieggiare.
Questo sito è un viaggio serpentesco, inerpicato e "inalberato" melodiosamente nelle nostre tempie, Tempio di meningi oscure contro l'oscurantismo.
Guai a toccarlo, a lederlo o a demolirlo. Se sfiderete tale mon(ol)ito, sarete ar(re)si all'Inferno dell'imbecillità di massa.
Amen.
Quest' opera è distribuita con licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non opere derivate 3.0 Unported.
