Movie Reviews
Flawed Humans, Awkward Sex, Messy Relationships: Yep, ‘Sharp Stick’ Is a Lena Dunham Movie
![Flawed Humans, Awkward Sex, Messy Relationships: Yep, ‘Sharp Stick’ Is a Lena Dunham Movie Flawed Humans, Awkward Sex, Messy Relationships: Yep, ‘Sharp Stick’ Is a Lena Dunham Movie](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/SharpStick_0351583c.jpg)
Early in Lena Dunham’s bittersweet Sharp Stick, which fits vast this week, two younger ladies are handled, but once more, to their origin tales. Their mom, Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh), believes in ritual. Treina (Taylour Paige) is the organic daughter of a stranger Marilyn met and befriended some years in the past, who ran away with a Scientologist after giving beginning, leaving the thirtysomething Marilyn — whose personal probabilities at being pregnant have been considered slim — to look after the younger girl she’d develop to name her daughter. Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), in the meantime, was the product of a fling with a good-looking private coach named Roy — a brief story for a brief relationship. “It’s finest simply to maintain it us three,” Marilyn says.
The small print are lovingly grotesque. Marilyn spins a story of a seductive Los Angeles, with its ghoulish males and their chodes and massive homes, its probability encounters and enticing potentialities. Most urgently, she makes the circumstances of every daughter’s beginning really feel particular, a bedtime story that they’ll return to repeatedly, the bedrock that makes this off-kilter crew, with their mixture of races (Treina is black, Marilyn and Sarah Jo white) and personalities and their unfastened, conversational freedom, really feel coherent, destined, entire. In brief, like a household.
Sharp Stick is Dunham’s second function, and already, inside its first handful of scenes, we’re plunged into the acquainted markers of the writer-director’s fashion: the endearing annoyingness, the combo of self-effacement and utter lack of self-awareness, the issues seemingly tattooed onto characters’ foreheads, the realizing consideration to how people speak and assume, even at their most inconsiderate. Dunham is after all greater than a author, director, and showrunner. HBO’s Women rendered her right into a phenomenon that was larger than anyone work largely due to a mode that appeared to chop dangerously near the lady herself. Any emotions concerning the work bled, unobstructed, into emotions about Dunham, not merely the artist, however the particular person. What makes Dunham’s artwork value watching is what makes a lot of it really feel like a chance. It invitations projection. Hear Dunham, enjoying a personality, say she needs to be a “voice of my technology” and assess accordingly — you may’t assist it, even realizing the artist’s knack for wry, humorous embellishment, even recognizing the self-laceration that’s barely scabbed over. The work appears to dare audiences, significantly Dunham’s friends, to pour salt into the wound. In order that they do.
Sharp Stick is hardly a movie by an artist who’s within the clear, culturally — and it’s a greater film for embracing vulnerability anyway, whether or not the knives out or not. You possibly can really feel it wandering via its unknowns with care (it’s onerous to not recall the conversations surrounding Women and its awkward dealing with of race when confronted with a white heroine whose sister is black sister, for instance, and the film appears to know as a lot) whereas doubling down on the confusion and imperfection that lend it its most concrete concepts, the issues that make its characters annoyingly, typically unappealingly, human.
Sharp Stick is primarily a movie about Sarah Jo, a 26-year-old caretaker with scars on her stomach from the hysterectomy she had when she was very younger — a process that’s left her out of the loop by way of intercourse, although not as a result of she lacks for want. Early on, throughout a video name for a category with different caretakers, we see her expounding on how a lot she loves her present project whereas, underneath the desk, she’s fingering her scar. As performed by Froseth, Sarah Jo is as brilliant and affable and (accordingly) seemingly misplaced as her title suggests, like a creature from one other planet or one other time, too unblemished to be human, too flower-power to be Twenty first-century. Evaluate her to her mom, along with her legacy of breakups and absent males, or her sister, who’s relationship a man that she’ll be head over heels for till she isn’t, which is how crushes work.
Sarah’s consideration is on Josh (Jon Bernthal), the daddy of the younger man that Sarah Jo cares for in the course of the day. It isn’t a spoiler to say that Sarah Jo talks Josh into an affair, intercourse with the babysitter being the trope that it’s. What can’t be spoiled is the icky, fruitful, sophisticated morass of emotions and concepts Dunham threads via this affair. It wouldn’t be actuality if Josh have been excellent. True to type for a piece by Dunham, Josh believes himself to be a loser. Possibly he’s. Regardless, he alerts as a lot from the beginning. When Sarah Jo comes onto him, it’s nearly an affront: Bernthal performs this man with sufficient jocular boyishness that when a youthful girl treats him just like the older man, like an grownup, it’s as if he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
There’s so much to discover in that hole, the fissure between between who we’re and who we’re considered, and Sharp Stick properties in unabashedly, if with nice care. You possibly can inform that Josh senses some misalignment between what Sarah Jo appears to have imagined him to be (a person who’s scorching for “being a person,” being an excellent father and husband) and the person that he may truly be (a stay-at-home dad, married to a spouse with cash, who will get away with indiscretions as a result of he’s a “good man”; a person who must develop up, on the one hand, however whose good qualities as a father spring from precisely this flaw, on the opposite). However he dives in anyway, partially as a result of it’s intercourse, however perhaps most of all as a result of he loves the concept of no matter it’s Sarah Jo believes him to be.
Earlier than Josh leans into the nice fortune of all of it, earlier than he and Sarah Jo have intercourse, he tries to guarantee her that he isn’t the sort of man she needs to have intercourse with for the primary time, as if this have been an esteemed place that he doesn’t deserve. However Sarah Jo’s on her personal planet — and, if something, her assertiveness about her personal flaws, such because the scar on her stomach, is extra ahead an act than Josh might ever muster. As with a lot else for Sarah Jo, the intercourse, after they lastly have it, seems like a fantasy, even when Josh proves himself to be one thing of a two-pump chump, at first. Dunham movies their intercourse scenes with a watch for wish-fulfillment: It appears nice even when it’s simply OK; it’s value remembering even when, within the scheme of issues, it isn’t memorable. That is intercourse from Sarah Jo’s perspective: wonderful as a result of she someway doesn’t know higher. That’s, till she is aware of higher.
Dunham characters are sometimes conscious of the pitfalls that await their personalities. They fuck up anyway. You possibly can particularly really feel this stability being labored out in a personality performed by Dunham herself (once more, true to type): Josh’s spouse, Heather, whose short-tempered frustrations appear extreme till we be taught what it’s that makes the vibe of their family really feel a bit of anxious. Life isn’t honest. It’s an outdated lesson, and in Sharp Stick, you may really feel it enjoying out between women and men, significantly within the attitudes of the opposite ladies in Sarah Jo’s life, who play at cynicism towards the endeavor however can not assist however appear a bit of hopeful regardless. You possibly can see the world this film has made, filled with counterpoints to Sarah Jo’s persistent sense of fantasy-romance, with indicators in every single place telling Sarah Jo to develop up, that Santa Claus isn’t actual.
She has to be taught this for herself. However Sharp Stick isn’t right here to punish her. Its classes are extra gradual, even optimistic. We glance out on the world for fashions of the way to be, even — particularly? — if our purview is a bubble. Some of the curious absences in Sarah Jo’s persona is a way of how she might have survived till 26 pondering that one provides a blowjob by, actually, blowing on a penis — particularly when she grew up in a house with a sexually energetic sister and a mom whose romantic life has been a revolving door. This query doesn’t level to a flaw within the film. It winds up being one among its most intriguing mysteries, a query that Froseth’s wide-eyed kidult vibe teases at and breaks open with out the actress breaking a lot as a sweat.
It’s sort of wonderful to observe Sarah Jo come into herself, even because the part of her sexual enlightenment — a fast enhance in intercourse with different males — feels glancing when it lastly comes, approached at a heightened pace that may solely be deliberate. Sarah Jo has intercourse like a girl making up for very long time. We watch her develop up years at a time inside these quick scenes, going from the early mishaps of expertise, to googling the phrase “two folks having intercourse collectively” when what she’s after is porn, to downloading an app (named Clitty Clitty Bang Bang) that offers her free reign to supply up anal intercourse to strangers, to falling in love with a porn star named Vance Leroy (Scott Speedman), who’s splendid as a result of, like her, he has scars, and in contrast to her, he feels no disgrace in them.
Sharp Stick is an empowerment story, however its characters are extra playfully imperfect and humorous than that label usually appears to permit. The internal youngster is at all times there, with Sarah Jo; it’s part of the package deal. It’s humorous. It is a girl who makes an alphabetized guidelines of sexual targets out of building paper and hangs it on her bed room wall — whose scorching streak of sexual interactions begins off in a plainly transactional mode, along with her wanting to chop down on the small speak and simply skip forward to the fucking. On this sense, a few of the males in Sharp Stick show stunning. The folks on this movie who do “unhealthy” issues aren’t unhealthy folks — if something, they arrive off as people who aren’t absolutely fashioned. Its sincerest, grandest trick is in giving us a heroine who solely appears to wish to develop up greater than everybody else. In reality, they’re all the identical. Sharp Stick loves them anyway.
![](https://newspub.live/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/np-logo.png)
Movie Reviews
‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc
![‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc ‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Martha_00044009_01191620.jpg?w=1440&h=810&crop=1)
From teenage model to upper-crust caterer to domestic doyenne to media-spanning billionaire to scapegoated convict to octogenarian thirst trap enthusiast and Snoop Dogg chum, Martha Stewart has had a life that defies belief, or at least congruity.
It’s an unlikely journey that has been carried out largely in the public eye, which gives R.J. Cutler a particular challenge with his new Netflix documentary, Martha. Maybe there are young viewers who don’t know what Martha Stewart‘s life was before she hosted dinner parties with Snoop. Perhaps there are older audiences who thought that after spending time at the prison misleadingly known as Camp Cupcake, Martha Stewart slunk off into embarrassed obscurity.
Martha
The Bottom Line Makes for an entertaining but evasive star subject.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Distributor: Netflix
Director: R.J. Cutler
1 hour 55 minutes
Those are probably the 115-minute documentary’s target audiences — people impressed enough to be interested in Martha Stewart, but not curious enough to have traced her course actively. It’s a very, very straightforward and linear documentary in which the actual revelations are limited more by your awareness than anything else.
In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject. The prolific documentarian has done films on the likes of Anna Wintour and Dick Cheney, so he knows from prickly stars, and in Martha Stewart he has a heroine with enough power and well-earned don’t-give-a-f**k that she’ll only say exactly what she wants to say in the context that she wants to say it. Icy when she wants to be, selectively candid when it suits her purposes, Stewart makes Martha into almost a collaboration: half the story she wants to tell and half the degree to which Cutler buys that story. And the latter, much more than the completely bland biographical trappings and rote formal approach, is entertaining.
Cutler has pushed the spotlight exclusively onto Stewart. Although he’s conducted many new interviews for the documentary, with friends and co-workers and family and even a few adversaries, only Stewart gets the on-screen talking head treatment. Everybody else gets to give their feedback in audio-only conversations that have to take their place behind footage of Martha through the years, as well as the current access Stewart gave production to what seems to have been mostly her lavish Turkey Hill farmhouse.
Those “access” scenes, in which Stewart goes about her business without acknowledging the camera, illustrate her general approach to the documentary, which I could sum up as “I’m prepared to give you my time, but mostly as it’s convenient to me.”
At 83 and still busier than almost any human on the globe, Stewart needs this documentary less than the documentary needs her, and she absolutely knows it. Cutler tries to draw her out and includes himself pushing Stewart on certain points, like the difference between her husband’s affair, which still angers her, and her own contemporaneous infidelity. Whenever possible, Stewart tries to absent herself from being an active part of the stickier conversations by handing off correspondences and her diary from prison, letting Cutler do what he wants with those semi-revealing documents.
“Take it out of the letters,” she instructs him after the dead-ended chat about the end of her marriage, adding that she simply doesn’t revel in self-pity.
And Cutler tries, getting a voiceover actor to read those letters and diary entries and filling in visual gaps with unremarkable still illustrations.
Just as Stewart makes Cutler fill in certain gaps, the director makes viewers read between the lines frequently. In the back-and-forth about their affairs, he mentions speaking with Andy, her ex, but Andy is never heard in the documentary. Take it as you will. And take it as you will that she blames prducer Mark Burnett for not understanding her brand in her post-prison daytime show — which may or may not explain Burnett’s absence, as well as the decision to treat The Martha Stewart Show as a fleeting disaster (it actually ran 1,162 episodes over seven seasons) and to pretend that The Apprentice: Martha Stewart never existed. The gaps and exclusions are particularly visible in the post-prison part of her life, which can be summed up as, “Everything was bad and then she roasted Justin Bieber and everything was good.”
Occasionally, Stewart gives the impression that she’s let her protective veneer slip, like when she says of the New York Post reporter covering her trial: “She’s dead now, thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with that crap that she was writing.” But that’s not letting anything slip. It’s pure and calculated and utterly cutthroat. More frequently when Stewart wants to show contempt, she rolls her eyes or stares in Cutler’s direction waiting for him to move on. That’s evisceration enough.
Stewart isn’t a producer on Martha, and I’m sure there are things here she probably would have preferred not to bother with again at all. But at the same time, you can sense that either she’s steering the theme of the documentary or she’s giving Cutler what he needs for his own clear theme. Throughout the first half, her desire for perfection is mentioned over and over again and, by the end, she pauses and summarizes her life’s course with, “I think imperfection is something that you can deal with.”
Seeing her interact with Cutler and with her staff, there’s no indication that she has set aside her exacting standards. Instead, she’s found a calculatedly imperfect version of herself that people like, and she’s perfected that. It is, as she might put it, a good thing.
Movie Reviews
Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad
![Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/191/afd/c29a986144336e39edf1ea310d979113fd-reagan-review.1x.rsocial.w1200.jpg)
Dennis Quaid in Reagan.
Photo: Showbiz Direct/Everett Collection
Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice. The picture attempts to take in the full arc of the President’s life, following him from childhood right through to his 1994 announcement at the age of 83 that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. But you’d never guess that this man was at all complex, complicated, conflicted — in other words, human. He might as well be one of those animatronic robots at Disney World, mouthing lines from his famous speeches.
Dennis Quaid, a very good actor who can usually work hints of sadness into his manic machismo, is hamstrung here by the need to impersonate. He gets the voice down well (and he certainly says “Well” a lot) and he tries to do what he can with Reagan’s occasional political or career setbacks, but gone is that unpredictable glint in the actor’s eye. This Reagan doesn’t seem to have much of an interior life. Everything he thinks or feels, he says — which is maybe an admirable trait in a politician, but makes for boring art.
The film’s arc is wide and its focus is narrow. Reagan is mainly about its subject’s lifelong opposition to Communism, carrying him through his battles against labor organizers as president of the Screen Actors Guild and eventually to higher public office. The movie is narrated by a retired Soviet intelligence official (Jon Voight) in the present day, answering a younger counterpart’s questions about how the Russian empire was destroyed. He calls Reagan “the Crusader” and the moniker is meant to be both combative and respectful: He admires Reagan’s single-minded dedication to fighting the Soviets. They, after all, were single-minded in their dedication to fighting the U.S., and the agent has a ton of folders and films proving that the KGB had been watching Reagan for a long, long time.
By the way, you did read that correctly. Jon Voight plays a KGB officer in this picture, complete with a super-thick Russian accent. There’s a lot of dress-up going on — it’s like Basquiat for Republicans, even though the cast is certainly not all Republicans — and there’s some campy fun to be had here. Much has been made of Creed’s Scott Stapp doing a very flamboyant Frank Sinatra, though I regret to announce that he’s only onscreen for a few seconds. Robert Davi gets more screentime as Leonid Brezhnev, as does Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner. Xander Berkeley puts in fine work as George Schultz, and a game Mena Suvari shows up as an intriguingly pissy Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife. As Margaret Thatcher, Lesley-Anne Down gets to utter an orgasmic “Well done, cowboy!” when she sees Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech on TV. And my ’80s-kid brain is still processing C. Thomas Howell being cast as Caspar Weinberger.
To be fair, a lot of historians give Reagan credit for helping bring about both the Gorbachev revolution and the eventual downfall of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, so the film’s focus is not in and of itself a misguided one. There are stories to be told within that scope — interesting ones, controversial ones, the kind that could get audiences talking and arguing, and even ones that could help breathe life into the moribund state of conservative filmmaking. But without any lifelike characters, it’s hard to find oneself caring, and thus, Reagan’s dedication to such narrow themes proves limiting. We get little mention of his family life (aside from his non-stop devotion to Nancy, played by Penelope Ann Miller, and vice versa). Other issues of the day are breezed through with a couple of quick montages. All of this could have given some texture to the story and lent dimensionality to such an enormously consequential figure. But then again, if the only character flaw you could find in Ronald Reagan was that he was too honest, then maybe you weren’t very serious about depicting him as a human being to begin with.
See All
Movie Reviews
‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War
![‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Don-t-Let-s-Go-to-the-Dogs-Tonight_Still_01-H-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
Alexandra Fuller‘s bestselling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa is so cinematic, full of personal drama and political upheaval against a vivid landscape, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been turned into a film before. But it was worth waiting for Embeth Davidtz’s eloquent adaptation, which depicts a child’s-eye view of the civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia — a change the girl’s white colonial parents fiercely resisted.
Davidtz, known as an actress (Schindler’s List, among many others), directs and wrote the screenplay for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and stars as Fuller’s sad, alcoholic mother. Or, actually, co-stars, because the entire movie rests on the tiny shoulders and remarkably lifelike performance of Lexi Venter — just 7 when the picture, her first, was shot. It is a bold risk to put so much weight on a child’s work, but like so many of Davidtz’s choices here, it also turns out to be shrewd.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
The Bottom Line Near perfection.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Cast: Lexi Venter, Embeth Davidtz, Zikhona Bali, Fumani N Shilubana, Rob Van Vuuren, Anina Hope Reed
Director-screenwriter: Embeth Davidtz
1 hour 38 minutes
Another those smart calls is to focus intensely on one period of Fuller’s childhood. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is set in 1980, just before and during the election that would bring the country’s Black majority to power. Bobo, as Fuller was called, is a raggedy kid with a perpetually dirty face and uncombed hair, who’s seen at times riding a motorbike or sneaking cigarettes. She runs around the family farm, whose run-down look and dusty ground tell of a hardscrabble existence. The film was shot in South Africa, and Willie Nel’s cinematography, with glaring bright light, suggests the scorching feel of the sun.
Much of the story is told in Bobo’s voiceover, in Venter’s completely natural delivery, and in another daring and effective choice, all of it is told from her point of view. Davidtz’s screenplay deftly lets us hear and see the racism that surrounds the child, and the ideas that she has innocently taken in from her parents. And we recognize the emotional cost of the war, even when Bobo doesn’t. She often mentions terrorists, saying she is afraid to go into the bathroom alone at night in case there’s one waiting for her “with a knife or a gun or a spear.” She keeps an eye out for them while riding into town in the family car with an armed convoy. “Africans turned into terrorists and that’s how the war started,” she explains, parroting what she has heard.
At one point, the convoy glides past an affluent white neighborhood. That glimpse helps Davidtz situate the Fullers, putting their assumptions of privilege into context. Bobo has absorbed those notions without quite losing her innocence. Referring to the family’s servants, her voiceover says that Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and Jacob (Fumani N. Shilubana) live on the farm, and that “Africans don’t have last names.” Bobo adores Sarah and the stories she tells from her own culture, but Bobo also feels that she can boss Sarah around.
Venter is astonishing throughout. In close-up, she looks wide-eyed and aghast when visiting her grandfather, who has apparently had a stroke. At another point, she says of her mother, “Mum says she’d trade all of us for a horse and her dogs.” When she says, after the briefest pause, “But I know that’s not true,” her tone is not one of defiant disbelief or childlike belief, as might have been expected. It’s more nuanced, with a hint of sadness that suggests a realization just beyond her young grasp. Davidtz surely had a lot to do with that, and her editor, Nicholas Contaras, has cut all Bobo’s scenes into a sharply perfect length. Nonetheless, Venter’s work here brings to mind Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar as a child for her thoroughly believable role as a girl also who sees more than she knows in The Piano.
The largely South African cast displays the same naturalism as Venter, creating a consistent tone. Rob Van Vuuren plays Bobo’s father, who is at times away fighting, and Anina Hope Reed is her older sister. Bali and Shilubana are especially impressive as Sarah and Jacob, their portrayals suggesting a resistance to white rule that the characters can’t always speak out loud.
Davidtz has a showier role as Nicola Fuller. (The movie doesn’t explain its title, which hails from the early 20th century writer A.P Herbert’s line, “Don’t let’s go the dogs tonight, for mother will be there.”) Once, Nicola shoots a snake in the kitchen and calmly wanders off, ordering Jacob to bring her tea. More often, Bobo watches her mother drift around the house or sit on the porch in an alcoholic fog. But when her voiceover tells us about the little sister who drowned, we fathom the grief behind Nicola’s depression. And wrong-headed though she is, we understand her fury and distress when the election results make her feel that she is about to lose the country she thinks of as home. Davidtz gives herself a scene at a neighborhood dance that goes on a bit too long, but it’s the rare sequence that does.
There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.
-
Connecticut1 week ago
Oxford church provides sanctuary during Sunday's damaging storm
-
Technology1 week ago
Breakthrough robo-glove gives you superhuman grip
-
Politics1 week ago
2024 showdown: What happens next in the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump face-off
-
News1 week ago
Who Are Kamala Harris’s 1.5 Million New Donors?
-
Politics1 week ago
Trump taunted over speculated RFK Jr endorsement: 'Weird as hell'
-
Politics1 week ago
Vivek Ramaswamy sounds off on potential RFK Jr. role in a Trump administration
-
World6 days ago
Portugal coast hit by 5.3 magnitude earthquake
-
Politics1 week ago
House GOP demands elite universities counteract 'dangerous' anti-Israel protests in the fall semester