TV Review: How To Get Away With Murder

No one can stop talking about Shonda Rhimes and Thursday nights on ABC. The creator/writer/executive producer owns three entire hours of primetime television. Grey’s Anatomy premiered the first episode of its 11^th season at 8pm with tumult between Meredith and her new sister. Scandal opened its 4^th season with retired white hat, Olivia Pope sipping red wine….on a deserted beach. And ABC’s Thursday night 3^rd hour is reserved for twisted law school lessons to elite first year law students in How To Get Away With Murder, lead by the Oscar-nominated film actress turned TV vixen, Viola Davis as double threat lawyer/professor,  Annalise Keating.

Aside from being brilliant and ruthless in her work, Davis’ Keating is personally complicated. Between an extra-marital affair, blurred lines of appropriateness between her and her students and a convoluted since of ethics, Rhimes has done it again. She has created a fully formed, captivatingly complex heroine. She did it with Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy, Addison Shephard in Private Practice, Olivia Pope in Scandal and now with Annalise Keating in Murder.

A New York Times critic reviewed Rhimes’ latest hit to less than stellar reviews, writing a critique (if you can call it that) almost entirely centered around a claim that  Rhimes is an “angry black woman” creating only “angry black woman” characters. Rhimes herself fired back at the critic on Twitter citing how completely ridiculous the comments were, referencing all of the white female characters that she has also created. Rhimes has done nothing but create characters that people want to watch. The women that she creates for the small screen are not docile, mild-mannered, June Cleavers. White, black, Asian – whatever their races may be, they’re women! She has built a name for herself for creating mosaic female characters that women want to play. Actress Portia de Rossi recently spoke about her new character on this season of Scandal and how she had begged Rhimes for quite some time to write her into the show somehow. Finally Rhimes obliged. Last time Portia looked in the mirror, I do not think she saw angry and I do not think she saw black looking back at her. But I think she saw strong. I think she saw a woman and I think she saw someone looking to be challenged in her work and she went to Rhimes for that.

How To Get Away with Murder is a sure thing. It’s an awe-inducing hit.   If you’re looking to catch up On Demand on the week’s shows, press play for Murder.

TV Review: ABC's Blackish

What does it mean to be black in America in the second decade of the 21^st century? ABC’s Blackish explores that with wit and lucidity in a way that no show on television does today. It is nothing, if not fresh with cultural and societal relevance of today’s modern America.

“It’s a far cry from where it all began. That’s why I promised my parents I would get an education, graduate and get myself outta there.” Andre Johnson, played by Anthony Anderson, opens the episode as he rises early to get a jumpstart on his day, narrating where he began, and where he is today. As Andre speaks, we see his large home, his impossibly grand shoe closet, his nice clothes, and we learn that he and his family of six are rare commodities in his mostly white neighborhood.

The pilot serves as a social commentary on how black people, in an effort to achieve the American dream, have left a bit of their culture behind, and along the way, the rest of the world has embraced it, calling it “urban.” He discusses a world where “Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke are R&B Gods. Kim Kardashian is the symbol for big butts, and Asian guys are just unholdable on the dance floor.” As a white woman steals his parking spot, she gets out of the car, gives him the finger and Andre discusses how not that he misses that time, but being the big scary black guy “did have its advantages.”

Executive Producer Laurence Fishburne plays old school father to Anderson’s modern day Dad.  Fishburn’s “Pops” serves as the symbol of the struggle, the roots of son Andre’s life of success, wealth, and privilege. Throughout the episode, Pops makes consistent points, acknowledging how bewildered he is with the way his son runs his family in comparison to the way he ran his own household. Although it is clear that he loves them deeply, it is also clear that he does not understand his grandchildren and their thought processes and ambitions. As a black female in America, I find Fishburne’s character most endearing as some of the things he says in this episode are things my own father has said to me before, cuing how big the generational gap really is.

Andre spins out of control and into a crazed effort to remind his family of their “blackness” after he is named SVP of Urban…yes Urban Development at the ad agency he has worked so hard at, essentially making him in charge of “black stuff.” At dinner,  while Andre rants to his family about his disappointment in the title and what that title really means, he learns how out of touch his kids are with black history. Obama is not the first black president to them – he is the only president they have ever known. This makes light of how “color” has far less meaning to kids today than it did 15 or 20 years ago because of how far African Americans have come as a race, in living the American Dream.  This idea is  made clear again when Andre’s two smallest kids are discussing a little girl in their class, who happens to be the only other black child in the class. They do not identify her as “the black girl,” but as the unfortunate, non-color descript nickname everyone in the class uses to describe her.

As the show takes on these social and political issues, it also, with great success, comically takes on black stereotypes. At dinner, Pops is disgruntled at the un-fried, fried chicken he must consume. When Andre’s oldest son, Andre Jr., (hilariously acted by Marcus Scribner), comes home from field hockey practice, his white friend searches their refrigerator for grape soda because his parents do not buy it.

Every year, new sit-coms come and go, most of them never getting picked up for a second season.  If this were roulette, I would bet on Blackish. It is truthfully written, honestly acted and it sticks. It has heart. I enjoyed my second watch even better than the first. If you’re looking for a new comedy to add to your DVR line up this fall, Blackish is it. 

This Is Where I Leave You

With an A-list cast, and a familiarly familial storyline, the novel turned screenplay, This Is Where I Leave You reminds us that no matter how utterly dysfunctional, sometimes family is all we have.

Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver (Girls), Corey Stoll (House of Cards), Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids, Neighbors) and Jane Fonda are just a few members of this cast of Hollywood veterans and Hollywood newcomers. The cast in large part will undoubtedly be the biggest draw of audiences to the theater. 

Jason Bateman leads as Judd Altman, the soon-to-be-divorced, middle brother in a clan of  four estranged siblings. Bateman is interesting to me as an actor. He is the only actor that has an A-list career for continually playing the exact same character – dry, emotionally withdrawn, sarcastic, yet somehow still compassionate and endearing. He is playing some version of Jason Bateman in every single film he makes and somehow, there is not another person I would rather see play the part. No one plays Jason Bateman quite like Jason Bateman, and in this film, I was particularly satisfied to see him reprise his recurring role.

Jane Fonda is great in the crude and excruciatingly honest role of a modern day mother to adult children. Adam Driver proves himself again to be one of the most promising actors of a generation. He showcases the same great moments of emotional poignancy that we have seen from his character in Girls on HBO. Watching him is a delight.

This Is Where I Leave You is about life and all of its hiccups and mess-ups, and awkward, uncomfortable, unsettling moments. It’s about being an adult and never quite having it all, even if everything on the surface looks picturesque. It’s about timing and how it’s almost never right. It’s about the past and the present, but more than all of that, it’s about love and family.

It is certainly not without its clichéd Hollywood family drama moments. Without question, this is a commercial film and meant for commercial audiences. If you are an indie/festival junkie and those are the only films you wish to see, this is not the movie for you.

The film is not without its flaws. Although the screenplay has its sage moments, the script is a bit all over the place, and could use focus and attention in various places. Certain characters could use fine-tuning, but all in all, it’s an enjoyable film with relatable characters that most will enjoy and even be able to identify with.

Take your friends and family out for a post Sunday brunch matinee and see This Is Where I Leave You. It’s light fare. 

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

I love a good gimmick…when it works.  Some might say that Richard Linklater’s new film, Boyhood, and it’s 12-year shooting schedule chronicling the evolution of it’s family of characters is… gimmicky. Perhaps…but it’s brilliant and revelatory in execution.  Both in title and production, Eleanor Rigby is the newest gimmick in filmmaking and although brazen and respectable in ambition, it achieves little.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is a film that has been released at various film festivals in three different cuts : Him, Her, and Them.  In all three films, writer and director Ned Benson discusses the intricacies of a married couple, essentially uncoupled by the death of their baby son.  Him captures the husband’s perspective, Her capturing the wife’s.  Them opens with one of the only two scenes capturing both Connor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) together. It captures the two of them early on - youthful, in love and in a relationship completely pure and uncomplicated by life’s complexities.

What I do love about the film are the themes it explores.  Connor and Eleanor grow up together, in a sense. They have a child together, and it is not until they lose that child that their relationship is put through trying times. Eleanor feels the losing of their child differently than Connor, who it seems chooses to ignore that it happened. He picks himself up and keeps “moving forward” as he mentions in a discussion with his father. Eleanor deals with her grief deeply…the second scene of the film shows Eleanor walking on a bridge, and jumping off in an attempt at suicide.  Benson is making a film about what happens when you grow up with someone, and what happens when one or both of you stops growing, or grows away from the other. Connor, for a large portion of the film, is living a life completely stagnant – he ignores the death of his son, his business is drowning, and in contrast,  Eleanor continues to move on by feeling everything that is happening to her to the point where she attempts suicide, leaves Connor, and decides to live with her parents and take University classes. At one point, Connor says he was lost without Eleanor and that once he met her, he thought he had it all “figured out” but feels lost again without her. The film also explores what happens when you depend on another person for your happiness. 

The motifs – those are the parts I loved. But those are all deductions I made through inference. My biggest issue is that not enough is seen or discussed on camera. The film is put together in various pieces, one scene a bit disjointed from the next and some of the most significant occurrences in the film are never talked about.  The fact that Eleanor has lost a son is not mentioned until more than twenty minutes into the film, and even throughout, it is rarely discussed. Most of the conversation is focused on Eleanor simply trying to figure out what to do next in her life, or Connor trying to find Eleanor and understand why she left him. Little is said about the actual reason for their current circumstances and the question I find myself asking the filmmaker is, why? What purpose does the lack of discussion of their lost child serve? The film has been compared to the Nicole Kidman drama, Rabbit Hole, based around a husband and wife’s struggles after the loss of their child. Unlike Eleanor Rigby,  Rabbit Hole leaves the audience moved and truly feeling for the characters because we actually get to know who they are and what they have been through. We know that a teen driver kills their little boy. We’re exposed to the accident. We see everything that happens before and after the accident. We do not see any of those elements in Eleanor Rigby. We do not know their son’s name, we don’t know how or why he died. We are also not aware of the last thing that happened between Connor and Eleanor before Eleanor tried to kill herself. We are exposed to two flashbacks of Connor and Eleanor’s past life throughout the film. Both of those flashbacks capture Connor and Eleanor in the prime of their relationship – young, carefree, potentially unmarried, and without children. They are the most well-acted and directed scenes in the entire film because we actually get a sense of the two of them together. There is an intimacy in these two scenes that I find myself yearning for throughout most of the film.

In the same vein, after Eleanor attempts to kill herself, we see her get out of the hospital and go straight to her parent’s house. No one verbally acknowledges what has just happened to Eleanor, but her parents go on to suggest her taking classes at the school that her father is also a professor at, and in the next scene, Eleanor has cut her hair and is headed to class with her Dad.  An attempt at suicide is a major life event. I do not understand why this topic is not made a bigger deal in the film. Why isn’t Eleanor in a mental health facility? Why isn’t she in counseling? I do not think the fact that Eleanor and her family, including Connor skate around this fact is realistic or believable. But more than all of that, the film’s consistent disregard for such major events that the storyline revolves around gives the audience nothing to hold onto in terms of the characters in the film. I left Eleanor Rigby feeling very little for Connor or Eleanor, because the screenplay chose to omit everything real, tragic, and heartbreaking happening in their lives. That’s not real life – we don’t get to fast-forward past the bad parts. We have to experience those too. Isn’t that the beauty in seeing a movie, especially in seeing independent cinema? It explores topics and subject matter that commercial filmmaking will not always do. Perhaps some will say that Eleanor Rigby leaves something to be desired. To that, I say “Yes, certainly…a little too much.”

And lastly, aside from extreme moments of predictability, my final grievance is that every character in the film is a mess. There is no moral center, or guiding light as Eleanor and Connor embark on these difficult chapters in their lives. Viola Davis plays the unhappy and disgruntled Professor Friedman. She and Eleanor eventually become close, in a very distant way. Professor Friedman has no husband, hardly talks to her son, and is not sure why she is a professor anymore. Connor’s best friend is Stuart, played by recent SNL alum, Bill Hader. Hader is great, and again proves himself as a comedian with real dramatic chops. Stuart is also Connor’s fledgling, uninspired restaurant chef. Each of these characters is so lost on their own that they’re unable to provide Connor or Eleanor with any real guidance or moral grounding.

I respect Ned Benson and the great amount of ambition behind this film. He took on a huge feat, making something of this magnitude and turning it into three films, but perhaps that is where the problem lies. Most of the meat, the heart of the film was probably left on the cutting room floor.