(A lyric from Paul Simon’s "Hearts and Bones" [1983 album named for the song; you can get a free Spanish lesson on this version, so pay attention], a tribute to ex-wife Carrie Fisher; saw him in concert in Ft. Worth, TX in the early 1980s with the promoters bringing her on stage as a nice surprise for him on the road. In the song Simon notes the Sangre de Cristo [Blood of Christ] Mountains in New Mexico; back in 1975 I hiked with a friend to the top [12,441 ft.] of Baldy Mountain in that range, ecstatic to find cooling lake water and snow near the summit on that hot summer day.)
(We camped by a lake like this one on the first night of the 2-day ascent.)
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
👉I've rushed this review into posting a bit earlier than usual, kept it somewhat short (well, I do try), and probably won’t post one next week because Nina and I have New England relatives arriving soon for a visit, but I’ll be back in Two Guys in the Dark mode by no later than July 19, 2023 hopefully with a focus on the recently-opened finale to the Indiana Jones series. See you soon. 😎
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) teaches creative writing at Manhattan’s New School, has had success with her memoir, now nervously has a new novel coming out, especially because her editor tells her it’s not strong enough; her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist who’s having limited success with some of his clients—especially a couple, Carolyn (Amber Tamblyn) and Jonathan (David Cross), who bicker with him as much as they do with each other, so he too is feeling somewhat inadequate in his profession. Beth and Don also are somewhat distant from their young-adult-son, Eliot (Owen Teague), who works in a marijuana shop, while Beth gets minimal support from her mother, Georgia (Jeannie Berlin), who’s convinced Beth’s previous book should have sold more, putting the blame on her agent (Mom also resists giving clothes she no longer wears to her daughters to give away at their church support service for the needy, even insisting at one point they retrieve a blouse they talked her out of); Beth retorts that its focus was on her father’s verbal abuse, that maybe if she had been the victim of physical abuse her sales would have increased. At least Beth gets support from her younger sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), but she’s got her own problems with husband Mark (Arian Moayed), an aspiring actor whose career’s going nowhere, making him feel useless to keep pursuing it (while Sarah lies to him about his talent), so you might feel that by watching this you’re just indulging in the “neurotics hour” (and a half), but then—comedy as this movie intends to be (?), although there are some good laugh lines in it—things get worse when Beth and Sarah are out walking, decide to slip into a store where they know Don’s accompanying Mark as he makes his usual meticulous choices about socks, but keep secluded before surprising their husbands, so Beth hears Don tell Mark how he doesn’t care for the novel (even though he’s been consistently supportive and encouraging in all their conversations about it).
The women sneak out, Beth's devastated, seems on the verge of leaving Don because she no longer trusts him. Further complications arise as Don knows something’s wrong yet Beth won’t talk about it, Eliot confesses he’s writing a play but doesn’t want to share it with his parents because he feels he wasn’t that close to them while growing up, Mark gets fired during rehearsals, Sarah can’t please a picky client about a simple light on the wall of a new home and wants to retire (much too young) as she hates both her job and its clients, Beth’s upset her students haven’t read her memoir. Beth finally tells Don why she’s grown so testy, walks away. Don’s arguing couple tell him they want back the $33 thousand they’ve spent on therapy as they’ve made no progress, but he just tells them to leave, get a divorce. Beth gets a positive reaction from her new agent; however, that joy’s tempered by Eliot telling her she always overvalued him, wasn’t honest about his shortcomings (in compensation for how she was undervalued by her father). Beth and Don talk over a restaurant dinner where she admits she’s lied about liking the constant gift of leaf earrings he buys her while he’s lied about liking the constant V-neck sweaters she gives him each year on their anniversary. ⇒Later, Beth goes to Eliot’s shop to buy some pot, then they huddle in fear when armed thieves arrive, Don rejects his former clients demand for reimbursement; Mark gets into a play where he’s well-received; Beth and Don give each other leaf earrings and a V-neck sweater as a joke as they’re back together; movie ends with them in bed reading Eliot’s play which he’s finally chosen to share.⇐
So What? In its own minor manner, … Feelings is kind of an amusing twist on Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), only here the offended party is the woman rather than the Moor of Venice, there’s no evil character orchestrating events as with Iago, nor does the lead female (Desdemona from long ago) end up dead. (Pretty weak comparison you say; well, let me defend myself by noting for extra credit in my high-school English IV class—where I was a little behind grade-wise as the spring semester moved toward the glories of graduation—I did an oral report on Othello, largely dismissing it because I just couldn’t believe the Moor could be so easily fooled by unsubstantiated lies [I guess if I’d ever had any thought of going to law school decades ago I might now be on some team bringing indictments against Donald Trump because I never gave any credibility to his lies about a fraudulent 2020 Presidential election either]; my teacher was obviously appalled at my dismissal of this renowned play, but all I had to do for extra credit was give a report, not convince her of its validity—we also butted heads about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famed poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [1798] where she said the dreaded albatross hung around the sailor’s neck was simply a metaphor while I argued there was no reason in the realm of the events depicted that it couldn’t be literal; looking back, I’m amazed I passed that course, but I did get inducted into the National Honor Society that semester so I guess she drew on her tolerance-reserve where I was concerned, even though when I [like everyone in the class] reimbursed her for my paperback copy of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities [1859] I paid in pennies. [Why I was such a jerk sometimes with Mrs. Rosenthal—among the faithful departed by now, I’m sure—I don’t know; however, she got a bit of revenge in the very early 21st century when I was in London, cried through the last scenes of the tragedy of Othello by the Royal Shakespeare Company, finally got what the deeper meaning of the narrative’s about—but still think the interpersonal conflicts in You Hurt My Feelings are on the level of my juvenile rejection of a Shakespeare masterpiece, so I guess this little story has now come full-circle.])
What we have in this movie is not so much of a plot (any quick indication of what happens would tell you about the lie Beth caught Don in) as it's a series of quick-interaction-scenes that in a way feel more like backstory than a progressing-narrative, but the actors consistently give substance to their situations, the whole thing moves forward at a pleasantly-concise-pace, and it’s always a great pleasure to see multiple Primetime Emmy-winner (as Outstanding Lead/Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series) Julia Louis-Dreyfus (NBC’s Seinfeld, 1996; CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine, 2006; HBO’s Veep, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 [that show also won Outstanding Comedy Series in 2015, 2016, 2017 with her as a producer] plus 15 other nominations for those series, making her the all-time champ of notice for Primetime Emmys and Screen Actors Guild [9 wins, 12 more noms]), who continues to show amazing talent in whatever role she’s in. But, whether you’re willing to pay a hefty price to rent this movie in a streaming format could be another question.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Certainly the CCAL would encourage you to fork over some cash for You Hurt My Feelings as the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews stand at 95% while the Metacritic average score is an encouraging 82% (very high for them). If you like, you can still find it in a few theaters (151 in the U.S.-Canada domestic market), after it opened in 912 of them (its widest release) back on May 26, 2023, but with a very limited box-office gross of $4.7 million domestically, just a bit more worldwide at $5.3 million total. More than likely, though, you’d find it on streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Vudu, and others where you’d need to pay a $19.99 rental fee (about what you’d pay for an afternoon matinee for 2, so maybe you could go out for dinner first like we did, then come home to finish off the evening’s entertainment). There’s a lot of good humor in the script, no one is vilified or physically injured (although there are a good many fragile egos here that take their various beatings), and you’ll get a good sense of what the mid-range-Manhattan-upper-crust is like in their private lives, so if that combination appeals to you, I’d encourage a viewing; if not, I’m sure you can always find Louis-Dreyfus starring in a number of TV reruns. There’s really not much more to say about this essentially-charming-but-easily-forgettable-movie (where I come in surprisingly lower than the CCAL for a change), so I’ll just close out with my standard tactic of a Musical Metaphor, this time the Knickerbockers’ “Lies” (on their 1966 album titled like the song) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I_bG4VBHCU because as Beth and Don struggle through a crisis in their marriage, they—but she especially—feel they’re encountering “Lies, lies / I can’t believe a word you say / Lies, lies / Are gonna make you sad someday” (even though they’re nowhere near the misery level of Othello and Desdemona [no comedy there, for damn sure]).
SHORT TAKES
Here’s the trailer:
You might be interested in this documentary (no Spoilers, all public record) about famous movie/TV actor Rock Hudson (born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in Winnetka, IL, 1925, later became Roy Fitzgerald when his divorced mother married Wallace Fitzgerald, even though Roy didn’t care for him at all). Following high-school he enlisted in the U.S. Navy for the final year of WW II, then settled in L.A. with his biological Dad to pursue acting, which wasn’t going well. However, in those postwar days there was a demand for beefcake movie stars, so with the great help of agent Henry Wilson (who changed his name; “Rock” didn’t care for that either, but it helped him get noticed, led to a long career with Universal-International) he piled up a number of roles, improving his craft as he became a star with Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954), All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955), and Giant (George Stevens, 1956) which earned him a Best Actor nomination (James Dean also, both lost to Yul Brynner for The King and I [Walter Lang]; Stevens won for Best Director); then he co-starred with Doris Day in a few romcoms, from 1959 (Pillow Talk [Michael Gordon]; Hudson voted the most popular star in the movie business that year) to Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964).
After that, his movie career generally declined, but his popular presence was revived on TV with McMillan & Wife (1971-’77), followed by a short stint on Dynasty (1984-’85), with declining health largely taking him out of the public eye until his death in 1985. The other major theme of this biopic, though, is his private life as a gay man, a secret he and his various studio handlers tried furiously to keep from being known despite relationships with various men (although many Hollywood stars, especially Elizabeth Taylor, were aware of his sexual preferences but kept quiet about it). To divert inquiries into his private life, Hudson married Phyllis Gates (1955-’58), who was later claimed to be lesbian; in the early 1970s a joke rumor made the rounds that he was going to marry Jim Nabors, but noting came of that. Ultimately, Hudson died of AIDS, shocking all those who saw him as an exemplary straight man but also giving substance to the reversal of a general dismissal of HIV/AIDS which at the time was seen by some as God’s punishment for the “blasphemy” of such gay lifestyles.
I’ve been concise about what’s to be found in this film so there’s a lot more to be seen if you choose to watch it (just as there are a lot more details about his life and career at this site); you might still be able to find it on cable’s HBO (where I saw it last weekend), but it’s definitely on their Max streaming platform (as well as AT&T’s DirectTV), free to subscribers. The CCAL generally supports that decision, with RT positives at 86%, MC average score of 71%, yet I must admit it’s just a straightforward biography with little of significant revelation, although it’s quite touching abut how Hudson was forced by the rampant homophobia of his era to lead a damned, difficult double life.
Accordingly, for my Musical Metaphor—although I don’t know if he ever called himself a "friend of Dorothy" but he certainly could have—I’ll go with gay-icon Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” (from the famous movie, The Wizard of Oz [Victor Fleming, 1939]) at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU because even at the time Hudson died there was precious-little-social-acceptance of what have now come to be known as the LGBTQ+ communities, with Pride Month parades where so many now feel emboldened to fly their rainbow flags (even as our Supreme Court and many Republican legislatures are doing their best to reverse all those gains of recent years). Roy/Rock had to hide who he truly was (“If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can’t I?”), but now at least we can now acknowledge and explore the traumas that even a major Hollywood star faced in those dark days as we must find a national commitment never to return to them, despite what many of these contemporary GOP leaders might have us believe is “progress.”
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Some options for your consideration: (1) Actors union and Hollywood studios postpone strike; (2) Fire breaks out on Warner Bros. lot but contained; (3) What's new on Netflix in July 2023; (4) What's new on Amazon Prime Video in July 2023; (5) What's new on Hulu in July 2023; (6) What's new on Disney+ in July 2023; and (7) What's new on HBO/Max in July 2023.
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