Female Film Critics 24/375
Late night TV is big business where top ratings matter. If you’re the host and can’t deliver, your days are numbered. Emma Thompson delivers a terrific performance in Amazon Original’s Late Night, a smart, tightly paced comedy with witty characters, strong acting, and a hilarious femme-centric plot directed by Nisha Ganatra from a screenplay by Mindy Kaling.
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The line of dialogue – “You’re always sorry and there’s always a speech, but nobody cares anymore” – pretty well sums up the entire enterprise. Dark Phoenix is a fizzle, causing the iconic, stand-alone series to crash-and-burn. Will the heroic mutants now join the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Who knows? Who cares?
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Thompson plays Katherine Newberry, a British comic who has spent nearly three decades as the only female late-night talk-show host on American television (talk about your summer movie fantasies). Although she has sacrificed plenty to become an award-winning entertainment icon, Katherine has become stubbornly complacent and snobbishly behind the times over the years.
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Joy of joys, Always Be My Maybe is a joy. It’s not a box-ticking exercise in diverse filmmaking. I wish I didn’t have to say that. I don’t want to say that and I don’t think that’s even a thing. But some people reading this will think it is. To them I say: Get over your white-ass self.
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When Thompson and Kaling are together, the sparks fly. But all the boys-will-be-boys humor attached to the previously all-male writing team often smells a little stale and overdone. But is Late Night worth watching? Very much so, thanks primarily to the ladies, who include Amy Ryan’s no-nonsense network executive. Let’s just say it lives up to Newbury’s own show-ending catchphrase – it earns the privilege of your time.
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Clarification: this Godzilla bears little resemblance to the iconic sci-fi creature called “Gojira” that Ishiro Honda and his Japanese collaborators created in 1954 as a warning against nuclear proliferation after the horrific W.W.II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Between the nifty way the zombies collapse into piles of ash when beheaded and the committed performances by Tilda Swinton, playing a Scottish mortician and samurai warrior, and Tom Waits, as a cantankerous hermit determined to stay out of the carnage, “The Dead Don’t Die” offers just barely enough deadpan humor and quirky characters to keep it interesting until the credits roll.
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Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is an acerbic TV talk-show host who, when one of her beleaguered writers asks for a raise, citing a new baby/family responsibilities, fires him on the spot, noting that – for years – the male ‘good provider’ role was used as an excuse for underpaying women.
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The moment Nicole Maines first hit the news through the landmark human rights decision in the Doe v. Clenchy anti-discrimination case in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 2013, there was a strong indication that she would succeed at whatever she put her mind to. The good news for those of us with a desperate hunger for fresh young talent in film and television is that what she’s put her mind to is acting.
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Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson make a great, if unlikely, team, with Kaling handling the comedy heavy lifting and Thompson taking on the dramatic, more reflective stuff. Together they cover issues that women at either end of their career face – a rare, ambitious two-pronged approach. It is a lot of ground for one film to cover, and not everything works perfectly, but Late Night handles in well enough that it comes out a comedy winner.
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