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Posts Tagged ‘Wendy Makkena’

Sister Act

Friday, June 24th, 2022

SISTER ACT was released on May 29, 1992 and is of course the Golden Globe nominated feel-good fish-out-of-water comedy smash hit starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in THE PLAYER) as a lounge singer who witnesses a murder is put into witness protection pretending to be a nun in a convent and then ends up leading and reworking their choir. It’s not the type of movie I usually review, and I don’t really know how to dig as deep into it as I do on some of these, but I want to write about it if only to make this point: this, the most mainstream middle-of-the-road normal movie in this summer of ’92 retrospective so far, has kind of the same story as the (no pun intended) most alienating one, ALIEN 3, which came out the week before.

Think about it. Deloris is trying to escape from an unpleasant situation (dating mobster Vince LaRocca [Harvey Keitel in the same year as RESERVOIR DOGS and BAD LIEUTENANT]) when catastrophe forces her to seek shelter and live primitively within a tight knit community of same-gendered (female in this case) devout Christians. She’s made to look like them (wearing a nun’s habit rather than having her head shaven) and is unwelcome to some, particularly the person in charge (the Reverend Mother [Maggie Smith between HOOK and THE SECRET GARDEN] rather than the warden). But she ends up using her unique skills to lead them all in accomplishing the seemingly impossible (in this case making their choir sing well rather than killing a xenomorph without weapons). (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 14 Comments »

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Monday, December 9th, 2019

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD has been promoted as a Fred Rogers biopic, and it it is true that Tom Hanks (THE LADYKILLERS) tackles the challenge of portraying the famously gentle Neighborhood of Make-Believe resident. But it’s not his life story, or even the smarter kind of biopic that focuses on one period as a microcosm of his life. Instead it makes him a supporting character in the story of a journalist coming to terms with his estranged father while working on a magazine profile of Rogers. I guess it’s kind of like SAVING MR. BANKS, where Hanks played Walt Disney as co-lead with a highly fictionalized P.L. Travers, but it’s probly more comparable to if MILES AHEAD was mostly about Ewan McGregor’s character dealing with family issues and Miles Davis occasionally gives him good advice that he rejects until the end of the movie.

So it doesn’t matter much that this is coming on the heels of a popular documentary (WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?) that it could never equal – it’s not the same thing at all. They do manage to work in a few re-enactments of famous moments (a couple seconds of his congressional testimony) and remixes of scenes from the documentary (a crowded cafe – and therefore the theater you’re sitting in – goes silent when he asks our protagonist to stop and think about “the people who loved you into being”). But if I remember right the documentary had a part where writer Tom Junod said that writing a profile on Rogers for Esquire changed his attitude toward life, and this is mostly extrapolated from that idea, with Rogers as guest star guru to writer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys, TITUS). (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Drama, Reviews | 21 Comments »

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