Logan Lucky
What would you do to turn around a long string of bad luck? I mean long string… generational… maybe curse-level. I know what you’re thinking… you’d rob a bank right? Of course, that’s the obvious answer. OK, maybe it’s not the obvious answer but it’s an interesting answer in spite of its nonsensicalness. Logan Lucky is not a tight, make-sense movie - it’s a bit uneven, its motivations for the oddness that ensues within it are dubious and loosely linked, its resolution predictably impossible. It’s not tight, but it is fun – a bit of sharp whimsy in a movie season of bombast.Lucky’s director Steven Soderbergh (Oceans 11) assembles a quirky set of characters around the bumpkin-like West Virginian Jimmy Logan (played by a thicker-than-normal Channing Tatum). A once promising athlete, Jimmy is now a camouflage-wearing divorcee with a bum knee and a freshly-minted pink slip from his construction job. Commiseration with his one-armed, bartender brother Clyde (Adam Driver, The Force Awakens) reveals the sad history of the bedeviled Logan family including Clyde’s own injury suffered just before getting on a flight home from a tour in Iraq. It’s not clear that Jimmy believes in a Logan curse, that’s Clyde’s thing, but his depressive situation is enough for Jimmy to resort to planning, of all things, a grand crime to get off the mat.
It would be easy to just categorize Logan Lucky as a southern-fried Oceans 11 redo. But it would be just as easy to believe that Lucky was a Coen brother’s flick (think Raising Arizona) or even a Jared Hess (Nacho Libre) product. Yes, there’s a heist, but the perpetrators and surroundings are more important and more intriguing than the actual deed. There is not a dull piece in the ensemble: Daniel Craig (007) kills as safe-cracking Joe Bang, and his sleepy, drunk, and morally-motivated brothers and comrades in crime, Fish and Sam played by Jack Quaid (Hunger Games) and Brain Gleeson (Mother), are as equally out there as their bleached-haired, crew-cut older brother. Even Dwight Yokam as Bang’s jail warden connects – and they’re all obviously having a great time horsing it up during the romp. Granted, you may experience some periodic head scratching as the ridiculous caper unfolds. But the gusto of the gathered eccentrics more than make up for the lack of cohesiveness. 7 out of 10
Maudie
Muadie, a film inspired by the life of Nova Scotian folk artist Maud Lewis, is a simply-painted story of an unlikely life and a surprising rise. It is a subtle telling of a hard life given brightness and color beyond what it should have had. The film's poignancies, within an unlikely romance and a measured re-birth, are deftly communicated by director Aisling Walsh and a strong cast with small but powerful visuals; two fingers squeezing a drop of paint, a slow short stroke of a brush, the flight of a bird on a grey Canadian landscape, the swing of a screen door. The story that these scenes highlight is certainly sentimental, but Maudie turns out to be less about an underdog’s triumph and more about the multiple sides of humanity and the odd way it sometimes is achieved.Maude Lewis, played marvelously by Sally Hawkins, is “crooked” as Maudie might say; challenged by rheumatoid arthritic (we presume) from her youth on. She understands her circumstances but believes she can live and independent life. Desperate to remove herself from an aunt’s demeaning oversight, she takes an offer from a local recluse, Everett Lewis played by Ethan Hawke, to house-keep his small shack. Everett is a hard-scrabble fisherman. He is coarse and crude, limited socially from growing up in the isolation and uncertainty of an orphanage and with little inkling of how to interact with his new live in. As Maudie finds a natural outlet to her loneliness through painting the walls, windows and furniture of Everett’s small home with flowers, birds, and people, Everett softens. The two mismatched, odd socks evolve something deeper than there should have been.
The color that Maudie Lewis added to her life in this story moved from the screen to me. Maudie is not a completely joyful story though. Hard lives - all lives I guess - have hard beginnings, or hard middles, or hard endings. These are all there in Maudie, but always alongside the color and persistence of her art and spirit – and it all seems better than it should be. 8 out of 10.
