3 SNARKY REVIEWS TO BEGIN THE NEW YEAR!

 

HOOTENANNY A GO-GO aka ONCE UPON A COFFEE HOUSE (1965)

It's shocking to realize just how bad a movie can be. This was no doubt intended to cash in on the hootenanny music craze of the early 1960's. Presumably, that particular cultural trend came to a crashing halt after people saw this movie. The action, if you must describe it as such, takes place in a "cool" coffee house frequented by young college age types who are supposed to behave sort of like beatniks, but not really. The pseudo-Beat crowd is entertained by an endless succession of musical performances, each one more boring than the one before it. And there's a "hip" music/comedy act called Jim, Jake and Joan. The Joan in the group is none other than Joan ("Can we talk?") Rivers. Miss Rivers, young and just beginning her legendary career, is no less irritating and unamusing then when she was old and on her way out. In between all of these artistic events, there is some sort of plot. It has to do with the new owner of the coffee house trying to fit in with the hip crowd and win the attention of an attractive girl singer. The insipid dialogue spoken by the untalented actors almost made me wish the music would start up again. Almost.

That's Joan Rivers of Jim, Jake and Joan fame. A future star is indeed born.

CASE 39 (2009)

Somewhere between BRIDGET JONES' DIARY and JUDY, Renee Zellweger found herself treading water, literally, in this fairly ridiculous thriller. She plays a caseworker for Child Protective Services who rescues a ten-year-old girl from being horribly murdered by her parents. She lets the child come and live with her, only to discover that the kid is the monster, not the parents. This is yet another over-the-top, by-the-numbers horror flick that almost seems like a parody of the Demonic Child genre that began with angelic-looking Patty McCormick in THE BAD SEED, and reached its lamentable zenith, or nadir, depending on your outlook, with creepy Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST. Personally, I intend to avoid any future evil kid movies after surviving this bloody mess. The film's highlight is Bradley Cooper with hornets coming out of his nose. Try and top that trick, Hollywood. Undoubtedly, they will.

NOVITIATE (2017)

This is a lapsed Catholic fever dream masquerading as a motion picture.

 When agnostic single mother Nora Harris enrolls her daughter, Catherine, in a Catholic school, the girl finds herself drawn to the religion and becomes a convert. At age 17, Catherine feels a calling from God to enter a religious order, much to the dismay of her mother. The story takes place in the early 1960's when the Second Vatican Council was beginning the reforms that would forever alter the practice of Catholicism. The film follows Catherine's life in the convent, including her struggles with faith, discipline, and sexual awakening. It also shows how all of the nuns are affected by the changes imposed on them by the Council and the turmoil they're all experiencing.

Writer/director Margaret Betts has managed to make religious life seem so completely miserable and pointless that it's a miracle anyone would ever choose such a life. While the story does, on rare occasion, try to demonstrate some kind of balance and neutrality, it's difficult to trust a film that has AGENDA written all over it.

There are good performances by Margaret Qualley as Catherine and Julianne Nicholson as her mother. Melissa Leo, an actress always worth watching, plays the Mother Superior as a woman so rigid, cruel, and repressed, that she generates as much horror as she does sympathy. Denis O'Hare shows up briefly as possibly the most unlikeable archbishop ever portrayed on film.

All things considered, this is a downbeat, depressing experience.

Somebody hand me the DVD of THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S (1945) and let me reemerge into my Catholic comfort zone.