While Pitch Perfect 2 and Mad Max: Fury Road slug it out for box-office prominence in their second week — and my money’s on Furiosa — the studios tee up a pair of other, less-assured contenders and the indies scramble for whatever screens are available. Here’s what’s what:
Banksy Does New York: The English artist’s month-long residency in the five boroughs is captured in a new documentary, which Jose enjoys but doesn’t rate as highly as Exit Through the Gift Shop.
The Face of an Angel: Like most of the TIFF press corps, Rad was underwhelmed by Michael Winterbottom’s metafictional take on the Amanda Knox murder case. Dangit.
Poltergeist: Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt in a remake of the Spielberg/Hooper classic? Sign me up! Except that Fox declined to screen it for the press, so … um … UPDATE: I saw it. It’s bad.
Saint Laurent: I pulled the first YSL biopic, so Rad got to take the other one … which sounds like it was just as underwhelming, except 45 minutes longer. So, I win?
Tomorrowland: Brad Bird’s love of exceptionalism and alternate-reality production design makes this massive sci-fi adventure a constant delight, even if it doesn’t fully come together the way I think he wants it to. But as I say in the review, I’d rather watch a movie with too much on its mind than not enough.
Welcome to Me: Kristen Wiig fully commits to the dark, dark role of a bipolar woman who wins the lottery and buys her own talk show … but the movie around her just isn’t functioning on the same level.
So, yeah. That’s your weekend. Basically, if Tomorrowland doesn’t appeal to you just go see Mad Max: Fury Road. In 2D, like George intended.
Does Welcome to Me at least avoid the usual movie takes on mental illness, romanticizing it or according it some special deeper insight, that are so frustrating. This sounds like something I’d look forward to showing up on Netflix, but not if it’s going to frustrate me like Silver Linings Playbook did. For the record, I think the best performance/movie containing a mentally ill character was Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton. They got it right, but getting it right is pretty rare.
Well, it certainly doesn’t romanticize the character’s illness, and it doesn’t go the “Silver Linings” route either. Its treatment is pretty unsentimental, but that still doesn’t make for an interesting movie.