Rachel Morrison on grief, loss and her new movie

11 Oct

The prominent cinematographer, a Cambridge native, has directed her second film, “Love of Your Life.” She talks about filming in her hometown, how Ryan Coogler feels like family, and why she didn’t go to CRLS.

Rachel Morrison, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, will still get behind the camera now that she’s directing. Here she’s filming Margaret Qualley, the star of Morrison’s new movie “Love of Your Life.” Credit: Chiabella James / Prime

One of the most powerful women in filmmaking is Cambridge-bred Rachel Morrison, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose movies include “The Black Panther” and “Mudbound.” Morrison has moved to the director’s chair, making her debut in 2024 with the female boxing biopic “The Fire Inside.” Cambridge Day caught up with her as her new movie, “Love of Your Life,” opened at AMC Boston Common this week; it streams on Prime Video starting October 14.

In a universe of funky coincidence, it turns out Morrison played Cambridge youth soccer with Sian Heder, who directed the Oscar-winning, North Shore set, “CODA” (2022). Heder, whose mother Mags Harries created the “Glove Cycle” sculpture in the Porter Square MBTA station, went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin.

Morrison did not go to CRLS, which was my first question to her. She grew up on Hawthorne Street not far from the Charles Hotel, where we met, and attended Concord Academy because she wanted to play ice hockey (CRLS didn’t field a team then). Morrison was a shutterbug from a young age and at Concord Academy started to get interested in the moving picture. She studied both as an undergraduate at New York University, but in the real world knew she had to choose one over the other. “It took me a minute to realize that they’re completely different careers.” Morrison said. “You really can’t take a photo portfolio around by day and film reels around by night. There’s just so many hours in the day.”

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Affleck’s ‘Animals’ is a dog

11 Oct

Ben Affleck and Kerry Washington star in “Animals.” Credit: Warrick Page / Netflix

⭐⭐Rating: 1.5 out of 4.

Ben Affleck made it in Hollywood as an actor and Oscar-winning screenwriter, then proved to be a more-than-reliable filmmaker, with credits including “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town” and the true-story espionage thriller “Argo” (2012), which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for “Animals,” the new political crime drama that Affleck directs and stars in. It’s a maddening meander of divergent screenwriting ideas that never coalesce, with dialogue in places so banal and inert it might get an F in a screenwriting 101 class. It also wastes the talents of an impressive cast that includes Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun and Gillian Anderson.

Affleck stars as Mark Kimball, who is running to unseat the mayor of Los Angeles. He’s a former Marine from a working-class family who has become a lawyer and political activist. He’s also in an interracial marriage (Washington in a thankless, screeching part). And he has secrets, like using undocumented workers, that threaten to come out when his biracial son (Christopher Woodley) is kidnapped on Halloween while trick-or-treating with the Kimball’s nanny Cecilia (Adriana Paz), her undocumented boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez) and their son.

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Bourdain helped us see that food is the foundational human story

8 Oct

Reflections by a food and film critic about the evocative biopic “Tony” and how it changes the way we see the worl

“Tony,” the plucky biopic that follows a young Anthony Bourdain during the summer he fell in love with restaurant life in Provincetown in the mid-1970s, not only entertained me with its deep character dive into a mercurial soul who would become a food-culture icon but also took me back. During that same era, my family vacationed amid the dunes of Fisher Beach in nearby Truro, and I have fond memories of licking creamy soft-serve twists along Commercial Street, and perusing the endless bins of saltwater taffy from Cabot’s Candy — still there! But the best were the lobster boils my mother served on the sand-swept deck, setting out clear Pyrex bowls full of rich, drawn butter for dipping. We ate the clams and claw first and saved the tail for the savory end. 

Here at Cambridge Day I write about food and film. Seeing “Tony” made me wonder just why stories about food resonate so powerfully on the screen (and on the page) when you don’t get to taste or smell what’s being eaten? Bourdain spent most of his career answering that question without ever really asking it.

A portrait of Anthony Bourdain. Credit: Getty Images
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Crowds flock to Charlie’s Kitchen sidewalk sale

6 Oct

Memorabilia and the hope of helping its owners re-open drew extensive support for the Harvard Square institution. There may be more to sell next weekend.

Part of the crowds that gathered outside of Charlie’s Kitchen for its farewell sale Oct. 3, 2026.

Hundreds of people came by Charlie’s Kitchen to buy memorabilia and support its co-owner, David Toraji Oshima. Charlie’s, a beloved dive bar in Harvard Square, closed earlier this year due to internal flooding from a dishwasher malfunction. Oshima started the “everything must go” sale to prepare for whatever happens next, which might include relaunching the restaurant and bar.

Re-opening, perhaps at a new location, depends on how a pending insurance claim plays out, since the damage and repair is estimated at near one million dollars. Oshima and partner Derek Luangrath own the bar and restaurant business, while the property is owned by Paul Overgaag, the previous proprietor of Charlie’s and the nearby Red House.

While Oshima hopes to restart, he said the sale was also meant to help to connect with the community and to preserve memories of the place. His sale was slated to start at 3 p.m. Saturday but there were dozens lined up at 1:30PM, which both warmed Oshima and overwhelmed him. “Today was way better than I thought,” Oshima said. “I told everybody 3 to 5, but I started setting up at 1, and by about 1:30, I had hundreds of people here supporting me.”

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“Verity”

3 Oct

Lifeless on page and on screen

⭐1/2 Rating: 1.5 out of 4

The movie version of “Verity,” Colleen Hoover’s hackneyed page lift of Daphne du Maurier’s great 1938 Gothic psycho thriller “Rebecca,” has an all-star cast that may not be enough to give the romance novelist a fourth box office success. 

Some of that is due to the source material. Where du Maurier understood and gave shape to corrupt and conflicted souls, Hoover’s works play like soulless connect-the-dots exercises, and come off that way on screen. The script by Nick Antosca is unfortunately too loyal to Hoover’s novel, and director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick” and “The Idea of You”) is merely a serviceable filmmaker with a knack for small, cloistered melodrama. (In contrast, du Maurier’s was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, and won the Oscar for Best Picture.)

The cast, though, is an impressive assemblage, led by Anne Hathaway as the titular Verity Crawford, a wildly successful author who pens dark psychological thrillers by, for and about women (art imitating life?). It’s her fifth movie this year, and this is the one she’d probably hope people forget. Josh Hartnett plays her hunky husband and Dakota Johnson, who unfortunately regresses from her breakout in “The Lost Daughter” (2021) to her cinematic roots in the kinky sex nonsense “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015).

Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh is, like Verity, an author, but more literary. She’s also struggling financially; we meet her at a small independent bookstore in Manhattan reading to an audience of three. Later, as she’s packing up the apartment she’s being evicted from, her agent (Ismael Cruz Cordova) tells her of a big opportunity at publisher Hachette. Lowen dresses up and heads to the meeting, only to be spattered by blood when a cyclist is struck by a streaking car just feet away. Before she can even react, a chivalrous stranger (Hartnett) swoops in to literally give her the shirt off his back so she can go to her meeting. And after Lowen signs the NDA so she can learn about the offer, in walks Hartnett’s Jeremy, to tell her his wife, the famous author Verity, just had a car accident, is paralyzed and can’t speak. So Hachette wants to pay Lowen some good buck to ghost write Verity’s series.  

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“Digger”

3 Oct

What could have been redemption remains a disappointment

⭐1/2 Rating: 1.5 out of 4

The latest from revered filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a shocking disappointment, a meandering muddle more akin to his last effort, “Bardo” (2022). than his Oscar-caliber dramas like “Birdman” (2014) or “The Revenant” (2016). For the first hour we are subjected to one of the most bombastic, self-indulgent projects by a master helmsman since Francis Ford Coppola’s urban architecture mishegas, “Megalopolis” (2024). 

The backdrop of “Digger” involves a “Cats”-like cultural phenomena called “Fossil Fools” — I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers. Tom Cruise, as the paunchy, cantankerous oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, is tight enough with the POTUS (John Goodman) that he can get the leader of the free world and his military advisors to come meet with him at his ancestral estate (badly in need of roof repairs). 

There’s a lot of white people with money in “Digger,” which hints at having something to say about inherited wealth, white power structures and Christian values (for an example of a movie that addresses these issues well, see “One Battle After Another”). Those are just mirages, an exhausting exercise for the audience, which is forced to endure all-for-naught zaniness such as a 30-year-old cat with diarrhea using Digger’s sprawling bed as a litter box. It’s like Iñárritu morphed into Wes Anderson on a bad acid-trip.

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Reviews of “Heart of the Beast” and “Unabomber”

30 Sep

A survival thriller and a crime drama

“Heart of the Beast”

⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 2.5 out of 4

The vast wilds of Alaska are where James Belmont (Brad Pitt) goes to tamp down the PTSD he suffered as a former special ops sergeant, as well as heal the war scars of his loyal German Shepherd Odin, who served with Belmont during multiple Middle East tours. The two are flying around the wilds of the 49th state to do some birding, fishing and communing with nature.

 Odin’s scars are more visible: titanium fangs (someone smashed him with a brick during combat) and a prosthetic paw. Belmont matter-of-factly says he shot the responsible parties “in the head” during a campfire encounter with a jovial old coot also roaming the wilds, played by none other than the baritone-blessed J.K. Simmons (“Whiplash”). The two enjoy some tasty Belgian beers and go their separate ways in the morning as a storm is closing in. 

From there “Heart of the Beast” becomes one long perilous survival journey after Belmont suffers a heart attack (if the storm don’t get you cardiac arrest will) and the plane goes down. Frigid lake waters revive Belmont. He and Odin go on to endure encounters with bears, wolves and moose (oh my!), not to mention steep ravines and white-water rapids. Through all this, man and best friend seemingly have nine lives, in part because they take turns saving each other’s lives (the dog may get a tad more screen time than Pitt).  

This is the second pooch-and-person flick in two months, after August’s “The Dog Stars,” directed by Ridley Scott. This one, thankfully, spares us the human actor (in “Dog Stars” it’s Jacob Elordi) over-explaining the plot to the canine actor. This one is also set on Earth where the sweeping mountainous terrain of Alaska does a lot of cinematic heavy lifting. 

Unfortunately, “Heart” suffers from woeful computer FX to conjure the tooth and clawed furries of the wild — if he was still alive, Bart the Bear (from 1997’s “The Edge”) would have been a massive upgrade. The movie pretends to be a based on true-events kind of film, but it’s not, which makes the sepia-tinted flashbacks to war time both disruptive and unnecessary. Still, Pitt and Odin (played mostly by a dog named Uber) convincingly sell the deep connection of two beings who have seen the worst of the world and are seeking peace and solace both from within and through each other.

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Cambridge’s worst intersections getting safety makeovers

26 Sep

“High Crash Locations” are the target of a new effort by the Department of Transportation, starting with three between MIT and Central Square.

The intersection safety data map. Blue dots show safety projects that are or will be underway. Credit: City of Cambridge

After seven deaths in the last four years, the city’s taking new steps to fix its most dangerous intersections, starting with Mass Ave at Albany Street.

That intersection is at the top of Cambridge’s list of High Crash Locations (HCLs), as measured by the number and severity of crashes and whether those crashes involved people walking or biking. Although the Cambridge Department of Transportation (CDOT) has previously reviewed intersections for safety problems, this new program creates a formal process that will be updated every two years. At higher-ranked intersections, transportation staff will examine crash trends, travel patterns, conditions at the site and any recent or planned changes before determining what safety improvement measures to apply.

Jackie McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Cambridge Department of Transportation (CDOT), said the impetus behind the program came from concerns by city council and others, “especially after some of the fatalities that unfortunately happened and we were trying to identify and formalize the process.”

The program is part of the city’s ongoing Vision Zero effort to eliminate fatal and serious-injury crashes. Somerville has achieved zero road deaths for four years running. Cambridge has had seven fatalities in that same timeframe.

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“Primetime”

25 Sep

Catching predators in the name of fame


⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 4

Documentarian Lance Oppenheim (“Ren Faire,” “Spermworld”) steps into the narrative feature-scape with this lurid submersion into the early years of online predation, where chatrooms were used as Venus flytraps to snare underage targets and goad them into real-life meetups. The scummy underbelly, as Oppenheim depicts it in “Primetime,” isn’t seen so much in dirty basement dungeons as in the relish Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hansen and his crew on “To Catch a Predator” take in the lewd exchanges as they try to lure the next would-be predator.

Hansen and members of an online activist group baited a potential perpetrator online and goaded him or her into a real-life meetup at a camera-rigged house. They used a decoy (a paid actor posing as the underage target) to let the miscreant inside before Hansen, “Candid Camera”-style, sauntered in and cornered the suspect. The show was filled with quotes from their salacious online transcripts and questions about intent, as the cops waited outside, ready to swarm in.

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Reviews of “The Weight” and “Resident Evil”

18 Sep

Intensity in survival and horror

“The Weight”

⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4

In “The Weight,” a muscular, Depression-era survival drama, Ethan Hawke again looms large in a small, gritty framework. Hawke brings a lean, tightly wound intensity to a man carrying more than his body— or perhaps his soul — can bear. It’s another powerful performance, following a deserved Oscar nod for his turn as beleaguered lyricist Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” last year, and his portrayal of spiritual torment in “First Reformed” (2017). 

Set in Oregon in 1933, “The Weight” centers on Hawke’s Samuel Murphy, a widowed mechanic barely holding together a life for himself and his young daughter, Penny (Avy Berry). An unwise altercation lands him in a brutal prison work camp with Penny taken into state custody. Samuel’s only path back to reuniting with her comes through the camp’s corrupt warden, Clancy (a droll, snaky Russell Crowe), who offers him early release if he helps transport an illicit stash of gold through miles of treacherous wilderness.

Samuel sets out with a fractious band of convicts and armed overseers, among them Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Anna (Boston-born Julia Jones), a resourceful Native American woman who joins their perilous trek. The gold grows heavier with every arduous mile, but it’s hardly the only burden being carried. There’s Samuel’s guilt over losing Penny, his responsibility for those traveling with him and the moral toll of participating in Clancy’s corrupt enterprise. There’s also the crushing pressure that poverty places upon people with no good choices.

“The Weight” marks the feature-directing debut of Padraic McKinley, a veteran editor whose credits include “Dexter,” “Igby Goes Down” (2002) and Hawke’s 2020 John Brown mini-series “The Good Lord Bird.” McKinley’s background shows in the film’s lean construction and tactile action. In tempo, texture and tenor it feels akin to some of the best character-driven cinema from the New Hollywood-era— think “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), and William Friedkin’s 1977 film “Sorcerer.”

Like Clint Bentley’s similarly set “Train Dreams, (2025)” the film regards the American wilderness as beautiful, indifferent and faintly mythic, though McKinley substitutes hard-driving suspense for lyrical introspection. Crowe makes for a formidable avatar of institutional greed, but this is Hawke’s load to shoulder. Quiet, weathered and morally alert, he gives the film its grit—and its gravity.

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