First Reformed

Last night my friend Angela and I went to see First Reformed and I can honestly say that this film left me completely shattered.  It is a brutal portrayal of a man in torment with an incredible performance by Ethan Hawke.  Reverend Toller (Hawke) is the head of the First Reformed church, which is more of a tourist stop rather than a thriving religious community.  It is administered by a megachurch called Abundant Life and its leader, Pastor Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer), is concerned that the 250th anniversary celebration of First Reformed go off without a hitch.  He has reason to be concerned.  Toller is struggling physically (from a stomach ailment), emotionally (his son was killed in Iraq), and spiritually (he no longer feels that God listens to his prayers).  A pregnant parishioner named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) requests that he speak with her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), a radical environmentalist, because he is distraught at the thought of bringing a child into a world facing the cataclysmic effects of climate change.  This encounter further challenges Toller's faith, especially when he discovers that a major contributor to Abundant Life owns a company known for environmental violations.  This film was deeply upsetting to me because it grapples with ideas of despair and hope (I really struggle with the darkness in the world right now and sometimes I lose hope) but the ambiguous ending can be interpreted as either damnation or salvation.  My friend and I had different reactions but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and, for that reason, I believe it is one of the best films of the year.  It is not easy to watch but I recommend it.

Note:  Just give Ethan Hawke the Oscar right now.

On Chesil Beach

I am a huge fan of Ian McEwan in general and of his novella On Chesil Beach in particular so I have been impatiently waiting for the film adaptation of it to hit SLC theaters.  It has finally been released here so I saw it yesterday afternoon and I found it to be beautiful and incredibly moving.  Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle play Florence and Edward, a young couple recently married spending their honeymoon at a hotel by the sea.  They are both inexperienced and woefully uniformed about intimacy and as they awkwardly work up to doing the deed there are flashbacks of the two of them meeting and falling in love.  The tragedy is that they are incredibly passionate people and love each other deeply but in the build up to their wedding night he is embarrassed about his inexperience and she is terrified.  The repressive society in which they live (England in the early 1960s) does little to help their situation.  After a disastrous encounter Florence flees in horror and they have an epic confrontation on the beach which is fraught with emotion and causes Edward to make an impetuous decision.  It is only in retrospect, many years later, that Edward realizes that they could have been happy if they had only been able to talk about it without shame.  The final scene where Florence walks away from Edward as the camera pans out is so heartbreaking.  Ronan is absolutely luminous and gives yet another brilliant performance.  Howle, who plays the young Tony in The Sense of an Ending, is also outstanding (the two roles are very similar).  Usually flashbacks take the tension away from the narrative but here the juxtaposition of seeing Florence and Edward so happy and free with each other in the flashbacks and seeing them so tense and closed off on their wedding night is incredibly poignant.  This movie may not be for everyone because it is quite melancholy but I recommend it for the compelling story and strong lead performances.

Ocean's 8

Last week I saw a Thursday preview of Ocean's 8 and I really enjoyed this stylish and entertaining heist movie.  Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) has just been released from prison after five long years during which she has planned the ultimate heist.  She meets up with her former partner in crime, Lou (Cate Blanchett), and they begin forming a crew to steal a $150 million necklace which will be worn by actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) at the Met Gala.  Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter) is a down on her luck designer recruited to dress Daphne, Tammy (Sarah Paulson) is a suburban mom who comes out of retirement to fence the stolen diamonds, Anita (Mindy Kaling) is a jewelry maker who agrees to break down the necklace into smaller pieces, Nine Ball (Rihanna) is a hacker who can infiltrate the security system at the Met, and Constance (Awkwafina) is a street hustler needed to create a commotion at the gala.  All of these actresses are outstanding and they all have individual moments to shine in this movie.  I especially enjoyed Bonham Carter in the kind of eccentric role with which she excels and Anne Hathaway is clearly having a blast with her role as an insecure celebrity (the way they get her to choose Weil as her designer is hilarious). They look amazing with one fabulous costume after another, especially at the Met Gala which is so much fun (I loved the celebrity cameos).  However, these individual moments don't really add up to a great whole.  I found the heist to be rather bland because the stakes weren't that high.  They use high-tech gadgets for everything and actual problems (which are few and far between) are solved very conveniently.  Also, the references to Danny Ocean, from the original trilogy, seem shoehorned in and are not really necessary.  This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it because there is definitely a lot of fun to be had.  It provides exactly what you would expect from the franchise and I recommend it for the cast and the clothes!

Rugby!

Sean is playing rugby again this summer and he has already had a few games but I haven't been able to go to any of them.  Yesterday I was on aunt detail and one of my responsibilities was to get him to his games so I finally got to see him in action.  It is so fun to watch him play, even though rugby is absolutely incomprehensible!  His team has struggled a little bit this season and they lost their first two games.  In their third game against Olympus, however, they were on fire and got five tries!  This is the first game that South Davis has won and I'm choosing to believe that it was because I was there cheering so loudly!  I sure do love this kid and I love getting to spend time with him!

Summer Reading: We Were the Lucky Ones

The next selection on my summer reading list, We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter, was actually recommended to me by one of my students so you can imagine how eager I was to read it! Hunter, while interviewing her grandmother for a school project about her family history, discovered a heretofore unknown story about how her grandfather's entire family survived the Holocaust in Poland. This led to a decade-long quest to find out the details of his story and these details became the basis of her novel. At the start of the war the Kurcs are a comfortably well off and loving Jewish family living in Radom, Poland. Sol and Nechuma preside over three generations of their family including five children, their spouses, and a granddaughter. They try to ignore the horrors overtaking Europe but soon they are all separated as they try to escape the Nazis and they go to extraordinary lengths to survive and be reunited at the end of the war. Any novel about the Holocaust is going to be incredibly poignant and I had an emotional response to much of it, especially when one of the siblings and his family end up in a gulag in Siberia and when another sibling is looking for her daughter after the bombing of Warsaw, but there was both too little and too much going on for me to truly connect with it. The narrative is very episodic, jumping from character to character and location to location spanning long periods of time. It seemed as if the focus was to catch the reader up on what had happened since the last time we were with each character and then there would be a small vignette about what was currently happening. I would have liked a more in-depth exploration rather than a chronicle of events. I never really had the chance to connect with the characters because there were so many of them. It was often very confusing and I felt like I needed to keep notes on who was married to whom (some spouses were separated) and to have a map of where everyone was currently located. Also, there was very little dramatic tension because, although characters go through some incredibly harrowing experiences, I knew going in that everyone survives (they were the lucky ones, after all). I know that this is a story that many people will enjoy (my student thought it was the best book she had ever read) so I recommend it even though it didn't particularly appeal to me.

Note:  Have you read We Were the Lucky Ones?  What did you think?  Once again, I am in the minority with my response.