Turks & Caicos

Winona seems to have gotten back on top; she garners top billing in this 2014 film above such big names as Helena Bonham Carter and Christopher Walken. The complicated plot of the film is made slightly more complicated by the fact that Carter and Ryder are made up to look almost alike (not confusing for the Hayes-Bohs, but it could trip up most normal people), as are Christopher Walken and Bill Nighy.

We usually include a poster or DVD cover, but this work has none, as it is a movie-length episode of a new Masterpiece Theater series. Here Ryder is shown with Bill Nighy (no relation to Bill Nye).

A small detail that makes this film unusual is that -- at least for the first 15 minutes -- Christopher Walken does not play its creepiest character. That distinction is reserved for Zach Grenier as Dido (no relation to the real Dido), the sort of capitalist who thinks he is self-made and is brimming with contempt for public servants. Poetic justice for his churlish remarks makes him the shortest-lived member of the ensemble.

The film is set in -- and named for The Turks & Caicos. This is just one place -- a tropical dependency of the United Kingdom that has nothing to do with Turkey. In the film, as in real life, its main attribute is as a tax haven where unseemly corporate behavior can take place with little if any oversight of governments.

Much of the convoluted plot centers around schemes to construct prison facilities of dubious legal standing and to grossly overcharge for them in the process, but no mention is ever made of the geographic proximity of the characters to their main subject -- the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As much as I enjoy films with political implications, this script is in places a bit too obvious about its political goals. Most artless is a brief lecture by Walken -- directed more at the camera than at any particular character -- about the failure of "a president" to close Guantanamo.

Winona's own performance is rather good. As mentioned above, her place in the credits is really not justified by the centrality of her character's role. But through a series of complicated plots and subplots, she manages to rise above the writing and deliver a strong and interesting character with a variety of connections to those involved in the film's main conspiracies.

Final verdict: Three croquet balls, good enough for non-fans

Cafe Latte

Yes, I finally found a way to make this blog about coffee. Actually, when checking Noni's IMDb profile, I noticed an entire new (to us) page of other works, which threatens to blur the line between "completist" and "obsessive." If we just dip into the one readily available work on this list, however, we should be OK. (According to her main list of works, by the way, this blog is about 80 percent "compleat" at this point.

In this case, I can include the entire subject work in the blog, and it has taken me longer to post this than it will for viewers to watch. Enjoy:

This ad includes music in English by Maaja and Winona commenting about a canned latte. It is not clear whether her voice is being used. The product is a Japanese version of a Washington-state latte from Mt. Rainier Coffee. Coffee in Japan includes two ends of the spectrum -- highly convenient coffee in cans or from the kinds of vending machines that were once common in U.S. department stores, or exquisitely crafted coffees prepared by the cup in elegant glassware.

Noni was brought in to sell some of the former -- a canned latte. I am skeptical of the coffee, but this is a fun bit of early Winona charm, without any other actors to dilute the experience..

Final verdict: Four croquet balls

Autumn in New York

Autumn in New York is not a great movie. I was nominated to write this review because I think it rises to the level of mediocre movie, and Pam does not agree. I'll start with some of the things that are wrong with it.

It does not need Winona Ryder in the way that it needs Richard Gere. In this May-September romance, any number of women could have played the "May" role, though Our Noni did salvage some badly written scenes through sheer effort. (Some lines were beyond hope.)

But the September role requires an actor that almost every character can refer to as exceptionally good-looking for his age. And yes, those constant references and the ease with which Gere's character accepts them are part of what makes this not a great movie.

The other problem is predictability. (Insert half-hearted spoiler alert here, because everything you think it going to happen in this film is going to happen in this film.) IMDb called this a "romantic drama," which apparently means "romantic comedy with all of the usual plot points, except that someone dies."

The attraction between the main characters is, as Rod Stewart would say, purely physical. Because the pretext of their first date is a lie, it is no surprise that the inevitable break-up is also the result of a lie. The "boy gets girl back" moments -- I counted two - happen without even a moment's thought on the part of Noni's character or a hint of an apology. She is not even awake for the first reunion.

Moreover, this movie badly fails the Bechdel test, which required two named, female characters to discuss something other than a man. It would barely pass a modified Bechdel, in which two named, male characters discuss something other than Richard Gere's dimples.

So what, it is fair to ask, raises this film to the level of mediocre? First, it is simply not as bad as I remember it from our first viewing years ago, nor is it as painful to watch as some of the other films we have reviewed recently in the one- and two-croquet-ball category. Second, although many scenes were cringe-worthy, I managed to care just enough about the characters to get a little misty when the surgeon -- played very well by J.K. Simmons -- delivered the bad news we all knew was coming.

Finally, the whole film is easy on the eyes. Beautiful people, beautiful food (Gere plays a big-time chef with an implausibly lax work ethic), and most of all a beautiful autumn in New York. During a recent visit, our New Yorker friend Joe took us to this bridge, made famous by many movies, and clearly the strongest character in this one.

Final verdict: A scant three croquet balls -- good enough (barely) for non-fans

Homefront

Because Pam "hated each minute of this movie more than the one before," I am taking the lead on our review. I did not like the movie at all, and it is a testament to our Noni completist ambitions that either of us got past the opening sequence. Everything about IMDb synopsis would normally serve to keep this film far from Casa Hayes-Boh -- especially the words "meth" and the suggestion that Sly Stallone is now a writer.

A former DEA agent moves his family to a quiet town, where he soon tangles with a local meth druglord.

Director:

 Gary Fleder

Writers:

 Sylvester Stallone (screenplay), Chuck Logan(based on the novel by)

Stars:

 Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder 

Everything except the last two words, of course. Noni got through this, so we did, too.

We watch a lot of the old vampire-with-a-soul series Angel, so we are used to an implausibly flawless protagonist who simply cannot lose in hand-to-hand combat. But when that person and his assailants are mortals, it somehow becomes more difficult to watch the ever-increasing mayhem.

There is something of a plot -- a gothic Southern story -- involving levels of criminal conspiracies and shifting alliances among very bad people.

Where does Winona come into this? Very late, and in a relatively small role. She is James Franco's moll -- an archaic name for a gangster's girlfriend that I prefer to any of the meth-culture equivalents used in the film -- who is put in the position of intermediary between a ruthless, powerful drug lord (her boyfriend) and an even more ruthless, powerful drug lord bent on revenge against that former agent. It is Noni's character who has a flicker of conscience that does not exactly save the day, but that allows for our flawless hero to do so.

Skip this unless you like predictable action flicks with a lot of violence. Or you are a Noni nut.

Final verdict (for Noni's role, not the overall film): split decision, rounding up to two croquet balls.

Friends - The One with Rachel's Big Kiss

We were fans of the television series Friends in its early days, but stopped watching sometime around season five or six, so we missed the episode late in season seven that featured Our Winona, in which Ryder plays Melissa Warburton, former sorority sister to Rachel (Jennifer Aniston). Rachel confesses to the rest of the Friends gang that following a drunken luau during her senior year she and Melissa shared a kiss. The titillating tale also involved the banging together of coconut bras - thrilling Joey (Matt LeBlanc) while putting Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) in true skeptic mode. Rachel invites Phoebe to have dinner with her and Melissa in order to set the record straight (so to speak) but Melissa completely denies the incident.

Ryder is at her best psycho-self here. She has a range of roles to play within the 21-minute time span from shallow and entitled, to nutty, to lovesick and does them all with aplomb.

Available streaming on Netflix and Amazon this is episode 166 (Season 7; Episode 20)

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls
 

The Informers - a very bad movie

We didn't remember much of this movie, although we knew we'd seen it before because we gave it one star on Netflix. No change there. There wasn't so much a plot as just a poorly-written slice of life of a group of super-unlikeable characters from L.A., one of whom was the lead singer in a band called The Informers. We have no idea what the connection to the band ( if any) the rest of the characters had. We both kind of expected everything to come together at the end the way Crash or 21 Grams did, but it just seemed to end. A plot never emerged, nor was it ever clear which of the many look-alike (even naked) cast members was meant to be the sympathetic character.

Perhaps because of its purported connection to a rock band and its abundant drug references, this film resembles nothing so much as a remake of The Wall for the MTV generation. Except it has heron plus coke instead of heroin plus acid, and everyone is Pink.

Our Winona had a small-ish part as newscaster Cheryl Moore, who is having an affair with a divorced-but-about-to-get-back-with-his-wife jackass. She wasn't bad in the part, but it was such a bad movie overall that she had no room to shine. This is also the first movie we have seen in which a character has a television job, but it does not in any way relate to the story. Perhaps there are some scenes of News Anchor Noni on the cutting-room floor, where a better editor could have turned this into a two-star movie. We'll never know.

Check out the plot keywords on the imdb site (pubic hair!). We can't think of anything more accurate. There really was an awful lot of it.

Final Verdict: One Croquet Ball (even though IMDb fans give it 5.1/10)

 

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