Friday reviews: 8 September 2023

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, The Nun II, The Innocent and Theater Camp are all in cinemas, Merkel is on DocPlay and The Jewel Thief is on Disney+

I heard once that Tom Hanks (and wife Rita Wilson) made more money from producing My Big Fat Greek Wedding for their good friend Nia Vardalos than anything they did for themselves.

It was a phenomenon back in 2002, the first sequel took a while to arrive (2016) and now we have a third, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, the first to be directed by Vardalos as well as being written by her.

I’m sorry to report that the actual filmmaking on display here is pretty inept but there’s a fundamental decency about the project that encourages me to … look the other way.

A proudly out non-binary character, some wholesome reflections on the migrant experience (especially compared with the Syrian refugees attempting to rebuild their lives on the Greek island that the Portokalos family used to call home) are counterbalanced by scattershot ethnic stereotyping and some lazy plotting.

The Portokalos family en masse have been invited back to the home village for a reunion – the first visit for any of them – and to fulfil the dying wishes of their recently deceased patriarch (played in the earlier films by the late Michael Constantine). He wanted his childhood friends to be given his journal so they could see all the things he got up to after he left them for America.

The world ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek so, I suppose, it’s only fair that they get to reclaim it here.

The Nun II is a much better made film than MBFGW3 but has far fewer saving graces.

Part of the ever-expanding Conjuring universe, this film is a sequel to The Nun (obviously) in which Taissa Farmiga plays Sister Irene, a combination of Max von Sydow in The Exorcist and Miss Marple. But younger.

This combination of demonic horror and Brokenwood-style clue-following makes for a plodding time interrupted by occasional bouts of lengthy exposition and some sporadic bloody violence.

As I’ve been away from the day-to-day business of reviewing for a while, I am unfamiliar with how all these films are supposed to fit together and there was nothing about The Nun II that made want to know more – it really does presuppose you’ll know who all of these people are.

Louis Garrel is French cinema royalty – a third generation star – and since 2015 has also been a filmmaker of note in his own right.

His latest, The Innocent, is a perplexing mish-mash of genres and tones making it hard to know how you are supposed to be responding at any given moment. There’s nothing wrong with keeping an audience on its toes but this was unsatisfying.

Garrel plays a young man whose mother (Anouk Grinberg) teaches theatre to convicted felons – a detail plucked from Garrel’s autobiography – but who has a habit of falling for her students – a detail not plucked from that autobiography, at least I hope not.

Her recently released boyfriend (Roschdy Zem) encourages her to open a florist business despite her having no experience of either flowers or retail. Garrel’s character is mystified at how it is being funded and automatically assumes the worst.

The result is a combination of family melodrama, farce, heist-gone-wrong film and – thanks to Noémie Merlant from Portrait of a Lady on Fire – tenuous romcom, none of which works well enough on its own.

Last week, after watching Past Lives, my wife and I wondered why it is that modern cinema so often fails to take theatre as an art form seriously.

In Past Lives there is a rehearsal scene where aspiring playwright Nora (Greta Lee) watches an actor read an overwrought monologue and it’s common, I think, for theatre making to be perceived by filmmakers as precious, highly strung or somehow detached from reality.

Other examples are Adam Driver’s pompous theatre director in Marriage Story or delusional Michael Keaton in Birdman. In Asteroid City, the stage version of the story is kind of ridiculous – Jeff Goldblum smoking backstage in his alien costume – compared with the vividness that cinema brings.

I know there are counterfactuals but Theater Camp (directed, co-written by and starring Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman) is not one of them.

In this (now discredited genre of) mockumentary, we follow the inhabitants of an upstate New York summer camp dedicated to the performing arts. The owner of the camp is in a coma after a seizure and her dimwit influencer son (Jimmy Tatro) is in charge and the financial situation is perilous.

The kids are talented and enthusiastic, though, despite being the butt of as many jokes as the adults.

It’s not unfunny, I guess, but the targets are cheap and punching seems to be down rather than up in too many cases.

Theater Camp does take flight in the final scenes when the ironic detachment fails to hold out against the genuine sincerity of a good showtune. In that regard, it’s a bit like another production from Will Ferrell’s production house Gary/Gloria Sanchez, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. You laugh at these people until you start laughing with them (and then end up loving them).

Now streaming on DocPlay after featuring in the New Zealand International Film Festival, the portrait of the former German chancellor Angela Merkel will make you nostalgic for the distant days of 2015 when it was still possible to hope that principles, values and leadership would be able to stand up against the tides of bullshit, authoritarianism, reflexive oppositional syndrome and lazy cynicism we are confronted with now.

There’s a telling moment in the film when a White House staffer notes that at the end of Barack Obama’s farewell tour of Europe, Merkel had a tear in her eye while waving away the president’s motorcade. “I’ve never seen that before,” said the incredulous president. “I guess she knows she’s on her own now.”

Merkel is a good film and solid history. It’s not that long ago but kids should know this stuff – German reunification, the refugee crisis, the unintended consequences of relying on Russian fossil energy – and this is a good place to start.

Finally, another disreputable genre, the true crime history but The Jewel Thief (Disney+) is not without some interest.

Gerald Blanchard was a thief. Perhaps he still is. But when he was a full-time professional thief – from his high school days in the mid-80s until eventual capture in 2007 – he was a very good one. His fatal flaw was that his ego required that everyone knew precisely how good a thief he was, which meant he videotaped almost everything he did.

Watching the young Blanchard, skinny kid with thick glasses, is like watching a young Justin Bieber pretending to be a gangster, but his ambition, preparation and patience eventually turned him from a petty fraudster into a phenomenally successful bank robber.

There are some fairly jaw-dropping moments in the film, not least the lax Canadian attitude to crimes against property which they took far less seriously than crimes of violence.

It’s not the first time that Blanchard’s tale has been told on screen and – considering his need for the spotlight – probably not the last.

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Next Week

The schedule may change, obviously, but next Friday I’ll be reviewing Kenneth Branagh’s third Poirot, A Haunting in Venice, minor DC superhero Blue Beetle, and another reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem as well as an Australian documentary about migratory shorebirds, Flyways.

And anything new and notable that shows up via streaming.