Screen Test

Dominic Sessa and Emilia Jones in “Tony.” Photo via IMDb.com. 'Most of us don’t know when our time will be up. Uncertainty is one of the things that keeps life interesting. But the rules don’t apply when it comes to subjects of biopics. (Bob Dylan, as usual, being the exception.) In biopics, knowing how the story ends is why the story is being told in the first place. Instead of suspense or surprise, we get a spoiler alert.  So we know going into the theater to see “Tony,” that the film’s subject is Anthony Bourdain.  More accurately, it’s an origin story of  a teen dude with attitude who would, decades later, gain international notice as a bad boy chef and bestselling author before morphing into a sardonic travel guide and hedonistic philosopher until he committed suicide. But that’s all yet to come. “Tony” takes place in the summer of 1975 when its protagonist was a 19-year-old writing student at Vassar College. Sure, a huge ego is a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to...

Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and George (Hugh Jackman) in "The Sheep Detectives."  Amazon MGM photo via IMDb.com Showing my age, I’ve become fond of British whodunnits on PBS. So the end of “Grantchester” along with summer recess of “Patience” produced a bit of a funk. Luckily a woolly posse arrived to pick up the slack. Now available on Prime Video, the peculiarly titled, family-friendly crime comedy “The Sheep Detectives” is unexpectedly touching, not to mention, great fun. Reminiscent of the groundbreaking “Babe,” most of the cast members have four legs and are computer-generated. A stellar ensemble led by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston  and Brett Goldstein provide their voices. Hugh Jackman leads the actual humans on screen, playing shepherd George. From his oh-so-cozy caravan (that’s British for Airstream) parked in their meadow, George is utterly devoted to his flock. He turns out to be a bloomin’ genius, too, and more than a little prescient as...

Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton in “The Invite.” Photo via IMDb.com New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has me rethinking my review of “The Odyssey.” With the ink barely dry on her 2023 Columbia University master’s degree in literature, she joins the classicists taking issue with writer-director Christopher Nolan’s version. It’s not just the absence of the gods in his retelling of the Greek epic. It’s the absence of SEX. The whole horny subtext is missing, Maureen complains. All of the randy coupling among humans and deities. She’s happy to do the lit-major strut, name dropping her way through the deleted erotic scenes. She reminded me that my own experience  of “The Odyssey” and its companion “The Iliad” pretty much took place in junior high school, when I wouldn’t have gotten the sex parts anyway. Looks like I might have to check out Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” that Nolan based his screenplay on. Actually reading a classic … what a...

      Matt Damon and his men in “The Odyssey. Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic - Universal Studios photo via IMDb.com After winning all those Oscars including Best Picture for “Oppenheimer,” writer-director Christopher Nolan goes back almost 3,000 years to essentially tell the same story all over again. It’s called “The Odyssey.” Created in ancient Greece by a blind bard named Homer, with its companion piece “The Iliad” it marked the transition from oral storytelling into what would become known as Western literature. For those who dozed, or more likely have zero recollection of high school English, “The Odyssey” recounts the decade brave warrior Odysseus (Matt Demon) spent fighting the Trojan War, followed by the decade he spent trying to return home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) in the Greek kingdom of Ithaca. It was, as an opening line of onscreen text informs us, “A time of apparent magic.” On his journey Odysseus encounte...