Tag: Netflix

‘Dumplin” review — Beauty pageants, self-love, and drag queens

Dumplin’ is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. It’s warm, filling, satisfying, and exactly what you’d expect, but that’s why it works.

Dumplin’ fills a feel-good movie shaped void in 2018. And while it doesn’t completely subvert the formula it applies it incredibly well to this touching coming-of-age story of self-love directed by Anne Fletcher—best known for directing the 2009 romantic-comedy The Proposal.

Based on the Julie Murphy novel of the same name, Dumplin’ follows Willowdean “Will” Dickson (Danielle MacDonald), the daughter of 1991 Miss Teen Bluebonnet and current director of the pageant Rosie Dickson (Jennifer Aniston), as she navigates life in her mother’s shadow.

While her mom is a mini-celebrity in their small Texas town, people are shocked to find that the overweight and unglamorous Will is Rosie’s daughter. However, Will finds strength from her late aunt Lucy—she instilled confidence in Will through their shared love of Dolly Parton (her music is a big reason why the movie works)—and her best friend Ellen (Lady Bird’s Odeya Rush—quite good here).

After being suspended for defending a fellow overweight girl named Millie (Maddie Baillio), Will decides to sign-up for the Miss Teen Bluebonnet Pageant as both an act of defiance against her mom who was absent from her upbringing and in support of her aunt Lucy, who wanted to try out when she was 16 but didn’t.

The first act is the kind of breezy setup that makes these kinds of movies so enjoyable to watch. Every character is carefully etched from the aloof Rosie and the enthusiastic Millie to the edgy feminist Hannah (Bex Taylor-Klaus)—she also joins the pageant in protest—to the steadfast Will.

Danielle Macdonald in Netflix’s Dumplin’

However, it also diverts from the formula a bit. Will’s romantic storyline with her love interest Bo (Luke Benward) reaches a climactic point early on in the movie as does her relationship with Ellen. Plus, the movie focuses primarily on the dynamics between Rosie and Will—who is called Dumplin’ by her mother much to her dismay—and Will’s inner struggle towards self-love.

It’s fitting that a lot of the growth in the character of Will comes from her interactions with a group of drag queens—Rhea Ranged (Harold Perrineau) and RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Ginger Minj—since so much about the art form comes from self-love.

However, the second act of the film meanders a bit and the final act, while completely uplifting and satisfying—reverts to the formula that we know. But that’s okay.

Dumplin’ is cinematic comfort food. It’s warm, filling, satisfying, and exactly what you expect. Here and there it surprises you—particuarly the strong performances from Aniston and Macdonald, who is having a great year between this and Bird Box—but overall it works because you know the story and can call its shots.

Netflix is becoming a powerhouse in these types of movies. Just this year they had To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Set it Up as examples of entertaining crowd-pleasing fare. Dumplin’ is yet another sequenced and southern fried feather in its cap.

Dumplin’ is now streaming on Netflix.

December 28, 2018
‘Calibre’ review — Netflix’s suspenseful Scottish Highlands thriller

Calibre is a lean and oppressively dark thriller set in the Scottish Highlands that announces Matt Palmer as an exciting new filmmaker and Jack Lowden as a star

Calibre at the beginning is interspersed with sweeping, silent shots of the Scottish Highlands. The shots are beautiful but foreboding and isolating. Slowly the film closes in. The shots get tighter and lighting gets darker. The movie is literally closing in on the main characters.

The film, which is director Matt Palmer’s feature debut, is methodical and precise in its plot as two friends, Vaughn (Jack Lowden—last seen in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk—is brilliant here) and Marcus (Martin McCann), go on a hunting trip far into the Scottish Highlands.

Palmer’s screenplay deftly sets up the relationship of the pair in the breezy first act of the film. Vaughn, who has fiance and baby on the way, and Marcus, a businessman with a cocaine habit, are old boarding schoolmates that have the air of friends that can pick up where they left off even after time apart.

Their hunting trip takes them to a small village on troubled times held up and led by Logan (Tony Curran in a great performance). Though their drunken night on the town is light and fun despite some tension with the locals, the trip is anything but a relaxing reunion between schoolmates.

Something remarkable happens about 20 minutes into the film. In short, the hunting trip goes awry and someone ends up dead. From that point on, it’s nearly impossible to look away from the screen for most of the running time. Continually Calibre wounds tighter and tighter as new information and increasingly distressing events hammer at the pair before a bracing but inevitable finale closes out the taut thriller.

Even more impressively, the most suspenseful scenes are the ones where it’s just characters talking. However, Palmer’s sharp writing and tight directing keep you at arm’s length so you’re constantly at the edge of your seat trying to decipher who knows what.

Calibre flirts with folk horror like Kill List and, in an odd way, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They all follow polished city folk as they go up against rural counterparts. However, the more important similarity is the main characters’ series of decisions that lead them to their fates.

Truly though, the story isn’t something we haven’t seen before. However, when a movie is told this effectively with a Hitchcockian flair—credit has to be given to Chris Wyatt’s masterful editing and composer Anne Nikitin simple but oppressive score—it’s hard not to be engrossed in Calibre.

Calibre is now streaming on Netflix!

Karl’s rating:

August 28, 2018
‘Alex Strangelove’ review — A coming out dramedy with an identity crisis

Alex Strangelove, now streaming on Netflix, is a coming out dramedy with an identity crisis despite a charming lead performance by Daniel Doheny.

Netflix’s Alex Strangelove follows on the heels of Love, Simon, the first LGBT teen movie from a major studio. Love, Simon succeeds mostly in part to its lack of self-importance. It treats protagonist Simon as any other protagonist in a teen rom-com. Its unremarkableness is what makes it so unremarkable. However, what elevated Love, Simon past typical rom-com is that it has a specific perspective — albeit a narrow one — and knows that perspective inside and out. Director Greg Berlanti has empathy for his characters and allows them to be real, despite the over-saturated teen movie-ness of it all.

It’s not always fair to compare movies to each other. However, when such similarly-themed movies come out in such close proximity to each other it’s hard not to. Alex Strangelove follows Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny), an average high-school senior who has everything going for him. He’s the class president, runs a successful YouTube channel about animals, and is on the verge of being accepted to Columbia University alongside his girlfriend Claire (Madeline Weinstein in a great performance). The one thing Alex hasn’t done yet before the end of his high school career is lost his virginity, something that he is insecure about, which Claire notices. It doesn’t help either that his group of friends seem to be the stereotypical sex-obsessed outsider teens.

For much of its first act, Alex Strangelove touts a quirky style, not unlike Mean Girls. That’s not just because the movie begins with a montage of various high school stereotypes being compared to animals. Though, if anything, it feels more forced than what Mean Girls achieves with its version of the scene. And while it’s not the most original, it works. That’s mostly thanks to Doheny’s charming performance as Alex. He overacts enough to match the style, while still maintaining some grounding in reality. His best scene — and the movie’s best scene — is his meet-cute with Elliott (Antonio Marziale).

This scene balances the two movies that Alex Strangelove is trying to be: a quirky teen sex comedy and an emotional melodrama. Alex and Elliott’s meeting is filled with awkwardness and jokes, but also has underlying sentiment as Elliott tells Alex how his coming out, which he made a video of and posted online, didn’t sit well with his father and was eventually kicked out. This slow down in the narrative works because it’s a genuine moment set within the context of the movie. Director Craig Johnson tries to recapture that feeling along the way — Claire speaking to her cancer-stricken mother, Alex’s friend Dell (Daniel Zolghadri) talking about rejection — but never quite gets there again. It feels like the studio asked for a raunchy sex comedy while Johnson set out to make a teen melodrama.

Love, Simon is the perfect example of a movie that strikes a balance between the two. That’s because Simon earns its emotional moments without slowing down the narrative or taking a pause from the inherent comedy of it all. Alex Strangelove tries to be what Love, Simon ended up being, but gets distracted along the way. Of course, both movies were filmed at the same time, so any similarities are purely coincidental. But they serve as counterpoints to each other. Simon does the teen coming out movie right, while Alex misses the mark.

I had similar issues with The Skeleton Twins, Johnson’s last project starring Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. In that movie, he mines the tropes of a family drama and infuses it with a darkly comedic tone that shifts awkwardly throughout. He handles the two movies that he’s trying to create better in Alex Strangelove but still doesn’t mend the two seamlessly together.

That being said, the fact that Alex Strangelove is on the homepage of Netflix and Love, Simon coming to VOD in the same month is heartening. And the movie has its moments. Alex and Elliott’s meet-cute, their trip to Brooklyn, and much of the first act work even if the connecting pieces don’t. I pined for more scenes of Alex and Elliott’s chemistry, which to the credit of Doheny and Marziale, is palpable. I wish we got more of that movie.

★★ out of five

June 17, 2018