Destination Wedding

Pam's review was succinct, and uttered as soon as the credits rolled:

"God, That was tedious!"

She asked Perry (our dog), "Wasn't that tedious?" And Perry did not disagree.

I had not thought of it that way, but yes, this RomCom was as tedious as it was predictable.

And yet... And yet, I said, I can maybe write just a bit more about it.

Image: IMDb

We have written quite a bit on this blog about Our Noni's long comeback. Following her very public shoplifting conviction, she took a lot of roles that we deemed beneath her. When she finally re-emerged, it took her some while to make the transition from her angsty adolescent persona to something more appropriate to her age (and ours -- she is 8 years younger than we are, but gaining on us).

She rediscovers her teenage cynic as Lindsay, a profoundly reluctant wedding guest, who falls in with Frank, who is equally reluctant and even more cynical. A dozen people are credited in this film, but only these two have speaking roles. (Four additional actors deserve credit in our opinion -- the passengers seated directly in front of Lindsay and Frank who never even flinch at their antics.)

Remarkably, our protagonists are shown at the wedding and all of the pre- and post- doings that have become standard in certain circles -- without their presence being noticed by anybody in the wedding party.

In lieu of direct interaction with the wedding's participants, the audience is treated to 90 minutes of patter about the wedding and related topics. At times, Lindsay and Frank echo Veronica and J.D., cloaking their growing romantic attraction in witty banter about the absurdity of the romance. At other times, they are channeling the front-row gang of Mystery Science Theater, popping off witty one-liners at the expense of those in the main show. This includes ageism, homophobia, transphobia, and inappropriate language regarding intersex individuals.

Some of the wit is genuinely witty, but the overall effect is tiresome, as the writers laboriously move through the inevitable three steps of any romantic comedy produced for a U.S. audience.

The IMDb entry mentions that this was filmed in ten days. That seems about right for what was essentially a two-person play, long on banter and short on plot or character development.

Final Verdict: one croquet ball

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

We watch a lot of films, mostly not blockbusters. They tend to go onto our Netflix queue and often stay there until we have forgotten which of us added them or why. About 24 minutes into the 2004 film The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, we each asked the other where this had come from.

Our phone rang at about this time, and we had a nice chat with Pam's mother. We mentioned we were watching a strange film (which is not really unusual for us) and that we were not sure we were going to finish it.

But after the call, we decided to give it a bit more of a chance -- a dark and tedious film does sometimes take a turn, after all -- and we resumed watching this tale of a young boy whose birth mother wins custody from the foster-care system, only to bring him into a life of neglect and abuse.

Almost immediately upon resuming our viewing, Our Noni was on the screen, though it took both of us a little while to recognize her. She was speaking with an unconvincing Southern accent, playing some sort of social worker "interviewing" the abused child who is at the center of this story. So there was our answer -- as Noni completists, we needed to watch the rest of this film.

Winona's character never returned, and although the interview could have been an important part of the story, no further reference was made to it. It seems that she was just one more in  a long line of characters who let down this child.

Probing the IMDb entry for what we might be missing about this film, we see this claim:

Behind the greatest hoax of our time is the heartbreaking story that started it all.

The poster captured above cites a "true story," but it is only true that this film illustrates the hoax; the story of the hoax is told in the 2016 film Author: The JT Leroy Story. The release of a film about the hoax perpetrated by the author behind The Heart is Deceitful may explain why the 2004 film finally reached video -- it had been on our Netflix "saved" list for years. Dennis Harvey's review in Variety calls the new film a "first-rate documentary about a remarkable literary hoax," but I doubt we will be watching it any time soon.

From the IMDb listing for The Heart is Deceitful, we also learned that Asia Argento has quite a loyal following. She wrote, directed, and starred in this film, and her defenders insist that it is an important and realistic portrayal of the uncomfortable subject of child abuse. The depravity is vivid and convincing, but the story is not well told. We gain little insight into mother or son or even into what connects them, beyond a few poignant indicators of their dependency on each other. There is no interior life, and there is no self-awareness.

Earlier in the evening, we had read an article in Fortune about a recent study of diversity -- or lack thereof -- in Hollywood. Among other things, it found -- not surprisingly -- that lack of diversity behind the camera contributes to lack of diversity in front of the screen. In particular, the inclusion of female writers and directors leads to better inclusion of women in films, as indicated by the Bechdel test. The Heart is Deceitful is a counter-example. Writer/director/star Asia Argento does not offer any dialog between female characters that might give the story more nuance.

Final Verdict: One croquet ball. This film employs Ryder only briefly, and does not employ her well.

The Ten

In preparing to watch The Ten, I was bracing myself for something that might be daringly irreverent, like Dogma. creating tension within my previously-devout self and imagined tension with my currently-devout friends. The fact that I had actually seen the film before was of no help, as I remembered barely one-tenth of it.

The film comprises ten vignettes, each "inspired" by one of the biblical commandments. Each vignette is introduced by a narrator addressing the camera directly, while his own marriage unravels by degrees, in 60-second snippets.

Having more than a passing interest in religion, I looked forward to seeing how these connections might be made. In at least half of the stories, I could not see the connection at all, and in no case was the commandment integral to the story.

The stories are not sophisticated, and much of the humor is intensely sophomoric, often offensive even to our permissive sensibilities. But in parts it is quite clever, and some of the later stories intersect with earlier stories in surprising ways.

To the all-important question of whether the story makes good use of Our Noni's special talents, the answer is, not much. Most of her scenes could have been carried equally well by another (that is, lesser) actress. Her character was caught in several unusual situations, to be sure, but only one brought out the Noni we have come to expect: her infatuation with a ventriloquist's dummy was played right up to the edge.

Final verdict:

Three croquet balls.

Lagniappe

James wrote the review above, but Pamela has already written about this film for her "Library" Books blog, which predates our joint Compleat Noni project. Read that review to find the library connection.

The Dilemma

If you find out your best friend's wife is cheating on him do you tell him? What if you were working together on a big testosterone-laden car development project for Chrysler and the whole thing would collapse if he found out? What if you weren't exactly sure what the "bro-code" said on the subject? Kevin James (Nick, the cuckold) and Vince Vaughn (Ronny, the friend) star in this awful bro-fest with Our Winona playing Geneva the cheating wife. This one was so bad not even Queen Latifa (in a supporting role) or Ron Howard (as director) could save it.

The movie follows Ronny as he tries to get evidence of Geneva's affair to give to Nick, and how this obsession effects his personal life, and his own romantic relationship. There is only the slightest exploration of what might cause a woman in a 20-year marriage to have an affair. This comedy is decidedly not funny, and in the end we all the the valuable lesson that no matter what concerns there might be about a relationship it can all be fixed with a big shiny engagement ring.

To find out what the experts say on the subject of "Should I tell" read this column from The New York Times' Ethicist

James adds: Pam describes our annoyance with the movie well, but we both agree that it "merits" two croquet balls. So what makes it not quite a complete failure? Some of the banter between Kevin James and Vince Vaughn in the first half is actually funny, or at least amusing. But as the movie begins to revolve around the "bro-code" halfway through, it became quite tiresome and somewhat offensive..

Final Verdict: Two Croquet Balls ("Must be one of her comebacks." Note that this is a step below "Good enough for non-fans.")

When Love is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story

This made-for-television movie from the Hallmark Hall of Fame was better than we expected. Our Winona played the title character, founder of Al-Anon and wife of Bill Wilson - the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). We were surprised to learn by watching this that Al-Anon started concurrently with AA when Lois Wilson discovered that the wives of all the men who were meeting in her living room were all waiting in cars outside her house, and she invited them in for tea. Ryder does an admirable job in this particularly emotional role.

Final Verdict: Three Croquet Balls

Celebrity

This was perhaps our third time around with this one, but we still only remembered bits and pieces of this black and white Woody Allen film. Kenneth Branagh plays Lee Simon a writer who is not only having trouble with both his novel and his screenplay, he has completely screwed up his personal life as well. After leaving his wife he goes through a succession of relationships, each time thinking that there is someone better just around the corner. Through it all he channels Woody Allen to a degree that is rather unnerving.

Our Winona has a smallish part as Nola, one of Lee's girlfriends. She flirts with him on several occasions, and then moves in with him, only to leave him again. Their relationship isn't explored deeply, and neither is her character. Her role appears to be simply that of flighty waitress/wanna-be-actress but she plays it as only Winona can.

Final Verdict: Three Croquet Balls

S1m0ne (aka Simone)

Our Winona has a small part in this film about an actress, Simone (Rachel Roberts), who is created with bits and bytes.

When temperamental Nicola Anders (Ryder) walks off the set of a film, director Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino) finishes his film with a computer-generated replacement. The world falls in love with the reclusive "Simone" and everyone wants to meet her. Taransky is dogged by the media requesting interviews with the hot new actress, and Taransky goes to ever greater lengths to keep his family, and even Simone's co-stars from finding out the truth. Eventually feeling completely trapped by the fraud, Taransky does away with Simone. If there is no body, can he be tried for murder?

Winona's role is brief, but she has some fun with it. She plays an actress whose demands for special treatment are so detailed and annoying that her director is driven to work with a digital actress who would be much less trouble. The irony, of course, is that caring for the fake actress ends up becoming far more taxing.

This is a fun movie, and worth-watching even for those who are not Winona fans.

Final Verdict: Three Croquet Balls

Sex and Death 101

As the title and the poster art imply, this is Noni in a smoldering role -- a most fatale of femmes -- but she is not given quite enough room to make this film her own.

Roderick Blank (Simon Baker) is, for reasons never made clear, fated to bed 101 women over the course of his life, while an unknown number of men around the world are fated to die at the conclusion of trysts with a mysterious woman. The fates are personified by three men in grey suits, whom Blank pesters endlessly for details about what will happen next and what it all means.

Eventually we realize that the paths of Gillian De Raisx (a.k.a. Death Nell, a.k.a. Our Noni) are destined to cross, but not before Baker's character exhausts every clichéd male fantasy in the book with impunity and abandon.

A few moments of introspection and many moments of cleverness make this film a bit better than its premise deserves, but not a lot better. For our final verdict, we had to review our standards carefully. This is good enough for non-fans, but does not quite reach the second tier of Noni's work.

Final verdict: three croquet balls.

Here With Me - the Music Video

Super creepy music video from Tim Burton starring Our Winona
The Killers -- Here with Me (2012)

 For more Burton/Ryder fun watch Beetlejuice Frankenweenie and Edward Scissorhands

Reality Bites

Multiple Choice Test

You have a choice of two loser boyfriends - which one should you pick?
a. The one with no job and no prospects
b. The super rich one
c. Neither a nor b

The correct answer, of course is "c". However, if you are going to insist on picking one of the losers, then the correct answer is "b". Lelaina Piece (Ryder) of course picks "a", and apparently the audience is supposed to cheer for this.

Actually, despite the trite ending, we liked this one. It has a funny script, and Our Winona is on top of her acting game. This movie also stars Janene Garofolo (Ryder's roommate), Ethan Hawke (loser "a"). Ben Stiller (as loser "b") and Steve Zahn (random gay friend). Four friends try to make their way in love and life following their college graduation, with usual relationship fumbles, and demeaning first jobs.

Trivial though her choices are by comparison, Our Noni's oscillation between "a" and "b" recalls the dilemma faced by Sonia Braga in Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos and later reprised by Sally Field.

This movie always comes to mind when the subject of gasoline credit cards comes up, though we had forgotten there were two ways in which Our Noni's character used her card to defraud her father.


Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

According to our Netfilx "Rental Activity" we first watched this movie about two and half years ago. We were surprised that we didn't remember much about it because it was quite a good film. Pippa Lee (Robin Wright) seems to be an ordinary housewife married to a much older man, Herb (Alan Arkin) but her "private" life (before marriage) was probably not something that her neighbors in the retirement community she lives in can possibly guess. Our Winona's role is small, yet pivitol. She spends most of her on-screen time crying and/or apologizing.

Final Verdict: Four croquet balls

The Age of Innocence

Although quite sure this was the third time we'd seen this film, neither of us remembered it very well. We had some sense of the mood, and the period, but could not remember the plot at all, much less that Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer also starred in this piece. Our Winona was nominated for an Oscar for her work in this critically-acclaimed film. The movie also received many other awards and nominations, including Oscar for Best Costume Design. It was a very good movie - a classic love triangle story in a beautiful setting, with a bit of comic relief.

To Pam's brief review I have only two additional comments. One is that the costumes impressed me very much, so I impressed myself by having noticed, along with the Academy! 

Second is that although this is a love triangle, and one of many years duration, a key question remains: does Our Noni's character know that there is a love triangle? Things are handled with such Victorian understatement that this is not clear to me ... so I'm not impressive at all in reading those clues!

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

The Iceman

In this film based on the true story of hit man Richard Kuklinski, Our Winona plays Debbie, Kuklinski's clueless wife. Living in suburbia with her blinders on Debbie raises her two daughters and enjoys the fruits of her husband's labors. She believes her husband works in currency arbitrage on Wall Street. Michael Shannon plays Kuklinksi - "Richie" to his family and friends. Richie is a doting husband and father, except occasionally when his work gets in the way. He goes to great lengths to hide his true identity from his family, but ultimately it all comes crashing down.

Our Winona plays this well, and she puts on a lovely Jersey accent for the role. Overall, though the story was fascinating, we did not enjoy its telling, which reveled in the gruesome murders and blood, with shadowy characters who are literally shadowy -- murmuring in so many dark corners that the plot was difficult to follow.

 The problem with being a completist is that in order to do so, one must watch films that one might not otherwise enjoy.

We did like the soundtrack.

Final verdict: Two croquet balls

Staying Cool

Maybe it is just an indication of how much our recent viewing of The Last Word had lowered our expectations, but this film was a bit more fun, with at least a few clever bits in the writing.

Henry McCarthy (Mark Polish) is an author of low-brow nonfiction who attempts to Stay Cool as he returns to his high school as a commencement speaker. He attends classes and events for several days in an effort to "reconnect" after almost two decades away from school. Decidedly low-key antics ensue.

Our Noni is Scarlett Smith, Henry's old flame, though the romance never burns bright enough to warrant the use of her fiery first name. Although Henry pursues her early in the film, he is equally interested in Shasta, a flirtatious student played by Hilary Duff. She pursues Henry as he pursues Scarlet, but nobody involved seems to realize that a love triangle has been formed. Henry simply drifts back and forth between the two in alternating scenes. It was actually rather refreshing to see nothing come of this triangle. There was no stupid scene in which one of the women involved "discovers" Henry with the other woman, and then makes the type of ugly face that movie directors think women make when they see such, which is then followed by the woman not talking to the guy for a long time, then coming back around to him in the end. None of that happened. It was also pleasing to see Duff's character played with more agency than one would normally expect in a film about high school hi jinx.

Some tension does develop between Henry and Scarlett's Neanderthal old boyfriend Brad. Her ex is as overplayed as is Henry's gay friend, known simply as "Big Girl." Chevy Chase as Principal Marshall is the only character to develop beyond a single dimension, or at least to play his single dimension with some imagination.

The film does have a couple of small brushes with relevance. Watching this during commencement season here in the Boston area, we were interested in the school administration's attempts to pre-censor Henry's speech. Student-led protests have led to a few cancellations in our area, for politics rather than prurience. It is during a "safety drill" in the library that Henry learns -- to his only slight dismay -- that preparations for active shooters have become routine in schools. Both issues are touched upon only lightly, though, as this film does not stray far at all from a predictable path.

"The library is still a sanctuary for the socially challenged."

Even the disparagement of the library is clichéd, though we can thank the writer for not putting any librarians in glasses and tight hair so that we could see them magically unfurled later in the film.

Final verdict: The high side of three croquet balls; a good-enough diversion for non-fans and better than some of the other mediocre works that characterize Noni's work in the decade of the Aughts.

Great Balls of Fire - Child Bride Noni

Pam writes: 
This film, from Our Winona's Heathers era, tells the story of Jerry Lee Lewis' (Dennis Quaid) marriage to his thirteen-year old cousin. Our Winona plays said cousin, Myra Brown. Displaying an amazing range of emotions from the naive smitten teenager, to the stunned bride, to the wealthy young wife who does not know what to do about all the media attention, we see Ryder in just the kind of role she was meant for. She and Quaid have a very natural chemistry as an unlikely couple who are both outraged by the media's attention to their marriage. The couple is so sympathetic, in fact, that viewers may find themselves at times confused about what to make of the media frenzy.

Watching this movie I wanted to turn away when I saw grown man Dennis Quaid bedding Ryder (who, although she was about 18 when the film was made, made a a very convincing 13-year old). The film focused only on a short period of Lewis' life - his rise to fame and fall from grace, which apparently all took place in the space of about a year. The film tells what appears to be a love story, and seems to set out to vindicate Lewis, so one would never guess that the marriage ended in divorce 13 years later. There is not even an epilogue indicating the fact that Lewis was married several more times following his divorce from his cousin. He is currently on his seventh marriage (the one to Brown being his third).

James adds:
I certainly shared Pam's aversion to the bedroom scenes, which would normally not be a problem in a Winona film! Even knowing that the actress was technically of age, the context was beyond creepy. I also wondered about the fact that all of the ire was directed at Lewis himself, and none of it at the institutions that legitimized his ongoing statutory rape. The church and state colluded in putting a sheen of legitimacy on a relationship that most agreed was transgressive in the extreme.

This film also explores the complex relationship Lewis had with another cousin - the Revered Jimmy Swaggart (played by Alec Baldwin, who also starred with Our Winona in Bettlejuice). It helps to explain the strong anti-rock crusades of the evangelical movement in the 1980s, which James encountered in Kansas City. A friend from church was a DJ at one of Swaggert's radio stations, and none of us could understand the extreme nature of the rules against rock music there. After viewing this film, it is easy to imagine that the famous preacher heard each rock song as a provocation from his more famous cousin.

Toward the end of the film, it occurred to me that although Quaid had to develop some piano skills for the shots that revealed his full arms (and, sometimes, legs) at the piano, a talented piano player was his double for many close-ups of the keyboard. "Who did they get for that?" I thought, not for a second imagining the answer: Jerry Lee Lewis himself was hammering the ivories in this film.

The film makers did not refrain from showing many of the deep flaws in his character, but his presence on the set surely tempered the overall tone.

Despite the high creepiness factor, this is an outstanding film, and among the best of Our Noni's performances.

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls