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Monday, August 22, 2016
Sunday, August 21, 2016
http://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/review/looking-the-movie
This is much better, actually. Though none of them touch on the Kevin bit: how much truth he speaks and the pretty fine acting by Russell Tovey.
Looking: The Movie
BY MATT BRENNAN
JULY 19, 2016
There's a moment in the opening minutes of Looking: The Movie that feels like old times, or lost youth (it can be tough to tell the difference). Pressing against each other in a semicircular booth, sipping Mai Tais under a faded mural, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and his friends revive arguments and repurpose jokes, slipping into the rhythms of their bygone days together. It's an unassuming sequence, peppered with details about the characters we've come to know, but it's also a potent one, sketching the faint outlines of a former life. A year since fleeing San Francisco for Denver, in the aftermath of “Looking for Home,” Patrick is in town for a wedding, and his return is a reckoning—with Richie (Raúl Castillo), with Kevin (Russell Tovey), with the person he was, is, and perhaps still hopes to be. In the movie, a lovely, bittersweet coda to HBO's underappreciated series, even the references to what's changed are a kind of reminiscence. Exquisitely nostalgic, it's as comfortable, and as complicated, as a reunion with an old friend, poring over the past in search of its promise and risking the sharp pang of regret.
In focusing on Patrick's desire to “close the chapter” and “bury the dead,” Looking: The Movie adopts his perspective, seeing the ensemble's successes through his eyes. As Dom (Murray Barlett) watches his restaurant grow, Doris (Lauren Weedman) revels in her relationship with Malik (Bashir Salahuddin), and Agustín (Frankie J. Álvarez), still with Eddie (Daniel Franzese), settles into a new gig, intimations of their own anxieties bubble to the surface, but Patrick's longing suffuses the movie with an idealistic glow. He suspects he's the last of his friends to figure it out, and Andrew Haigh's observant direction, floating through nightclubs and the city's streets, encourages empathic treatment of these doubts. As the image of Patrick alone in a mirror dissolves into a long, lingering pan across couples embracing and kissing, pairs blurring together into perfect wholes, the movie captures the poignant sense of incompleteness that we call disappointment. “This does not last forever,” Doris assures Patrick, seeing in his expression something she's been through herself. But for those in the midst of it, “this” can indeed appear infinite, its resolution out of reach.
If the movie, written by Haigh and series creator Michael Lannan, seems slight at times, in particular as it reduces Richie's boyfriend, Brady (Chris Perfetti), to a smug caricature, its depiction of a life at loose ends is nonetheless affecting, built from the naturalistic precision that's defined the series from the start. It may be that I, too, am in San Francisco for a friend's wedding, spending my time reflecting on the recent divergence of the life I'm leading from the one I'd planned, but Looking: The Movie cuts remarkably close to the bone—in particular Patrick's determination to go back over the preceding decade, as if the act of remembering might reshape the present. While the camera drifts through familiar locations (Patrick's former apartment, a bar called The End Up) and acute sensations (bad blood; cold feet; a steamy, tender fuck), the movie suggests the act of paging through a photo album, fingers caressing certain images, flipping past others. It's more selective in its attentions than the series was, with fewer jagged edges and more clean lines, but it mimics the ache of life's interstitial moments in meticulous detail, earning the sentimental affect of its conclusion: “What happens when you've sobered up, and the wedding's over, and you've lost this sense of romance?”
By the time the camera retreats for the last time, in a deft allusion to “Looking for Home,” Looking: The Movie can offer no firm answer, except perhaps that the only cure for the romance of retrospect is the leap of faith—the new home, the new career, the new marriage—that forces one to “adapt,” as a justice of the peace (Tyne Daly) counsels, if not quite to “change” completely. The movie recalls not Joan Didion's “Goodbye to All That,” to which I made reference in my “Looking for Home” recap, but “On Keeping a Notebook”: “I've already lost touch with a few of the people I used to be,” Didion writes, and this swansong, despite the warm optimism of its final sequence, also replicates her half-rueful remark. Move forward, Patrick urges himself. Close the chapter. Bury the dead. But his notion of the man he is, or was, remains integral to the man he might become. The one specter none of us manages to fend off is that of our former selves. We're running into them all the time.
This is much better, actually. Though none of them touch on the Kevin bit: how much truth he speaks and the pretty fine acting by Russell Tovey.
Looking: The Movie
BY MATT BRENNAN
JULY 19, 2016
There's a moment in the opening minutes of Looking: The Movie that feels like old times, or lost youth (it can be tough to tell the difference). Pressing against each other in a semicircular booth, sipping Mai Tais under a faded mural, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and his friends revive arguments and repurpose jokes, slipping into the rhythms of their bygone days together. It's an unassuming sequence, peppered with details about the characters we've come to know, but it's also a potent one, sketching the faint outlines of a former life. A year since fleeing San Francisco for Denver, in the aftermath of “Looking for Home,” Patrick is in town for a wedding, and his return is a reckoning—with Richie (Raúl Castillo), with Kevin (Russell Tovey), with the person he was, is, and perhaps still hopes to be. In the movie, a lovely, bittersweet coda to HBO's underappreciated series, even the references to what's changed are a kind of reminiscence. Exquisitely nostalgic, it's as comfortable, and as complicated, as a reunion with an old friend, poring over the past in search of its promise and risking the sharp pang of regret.
In focusing on Patrick's desire to “close the chapter” and “bury the dead,” Looking: The Movie adopts his perspective, seeing the ensemble's successes through his eyes. As Dom (Murray Barlett) watches his restaurant grow, Doris (Lauren Weedman) revels in her relationship with Malik (Bashir Salahuddin), and Agustín (Frankie J. Álvarez), still with Eddie (Daniel Franzese), settles into a new gig, intimations of their own anxieties bubble to the surface, but Patrick's longing suffuses the movie with an idealistic glow. He suspects he's the last of his friends to figure it out, and Andrew Haigh's observant direction, floating through nightclubs and the city's streets, encourages empathic treatment of these doubts. As the image of Patrick alone in a mirror dissolves into a long, lingering pan across couples embracing and kissing, pairs blurring together into perfect wholes, the movie captures the poignant sense of incompleteness that we call disappointment. “This does not last forever,” Doris assures Patrick, seeing in his expression something she's been through herself. But for those in the midst of it, “this” can indeed appear infinite, its resolution out of reach.
If the movie, written by Haigh and series creator Michael Lannan, seems slight at times, in particular as it reduces Richie's boyfriend, Brady (Chris Perfetti), to a smug caricature, its depiction of a life at loose ends is nonetheless affecting, built from the naturalistic precision that's defined the series from the start. It may be that I, too, am in San Francisco for a friend's wedding, spending my time reflecting on the recent divergence of the life I'm leading from the one I'd planned, but Looking: The Movie cuts remarkably close to the bone—in particular Patrick's determination to go back over the preceding decade, as if the act of remembering might reshape the present. While the camera drifts through familiar locations (Patrick's former apartment, a bar called The End Up) and acute sensations (bad blood; cold feet; a steamy, tender fuck), the movie suggests the act of paging through a photo album, fingers caressing certain images, flipping past others. It's more selective in its attentions than the series was, with fewer jagged edges and more clean lines, but it mimics the ache of life's interstitial moments in meticulous detail, earning the sentimental affect of its conclusion: “What happens when you've sobered up, and the wedding's over, and you've lost this sense of romance?”
By the time the camera retreats for the last time, in a deft allusion to “Looking for Home,” Looking: The Movie can offer no firm answer, except perhaps that the only cure for the romance of retrospect is the leap of faith—the new home, the new career, the new marriage—that forces one to “adapt,” as a justice of the peace (Tyne Daly) counsels, if not quite to “change” completely. The movie recalls not Joan Didion's “Goodbye to All That,” to which I made reference in my “Looking for Home” recap, but “On Keeping a Notebook”: “I've already lost touch with a few of the people I used to be,” Didion writes, and this swansong, despite the warm optimism of its final sequence, also replicates her half-rueful remark. Move forward, Patrick urges himself. Close the chapter. Bury the dead. But his notion of the man he is, or was, remains integral to the man he might become. The one specter none of us manages to fend off is that of our former selves. We're running into them all the time.
Looking: Love, always
From here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/arts/television/looking-the-movie-review.html?_r=0
“Are you all right?” a friend asks the angsty video-game designer Patrick (Jonathan Groff) early in “Looking: The Movie.” It’s the guiding question of the film, one that refers to two inquiries, actually: Are Patrick and his friends, 30- and 40-something gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area, all right with the way greater acceptance — symbolized by legal marriage — is changing their lives? And is Patrick, a narcissistic relationship saboteur, all right as his friends start pairing off for life?
The movie, on HBO on Saturday night, is a delayed finale for “Looking,”which ran for two seasons on the network. Written by the series’s creator, Michael Lannan, and one of its executive producers, Andrew Haigh, who also directed, it has the show’s virtues — its loose, casual vibe, the gorgeous San Francisco locations and the excellent performances by Mr. Groff and by Murray Bartlett, as Patrick’s levelheaded friend Dom.
It also has its faults, including some surprisingly flat acting for an HBO project and a tendency to get dull when the script moves away from the personal and into the larger issues of the gay community. Those glitches are more noticeable in an 85-minute film than they were in half-hour weekly episodes.
The show was criticized during its run for making the promiscuous, neurotic, commitment-phobic Patrick its central character, as if he were standing in for all gay men. The film incorporates and disarms that critique, having the jealous blogger Brady (Chris Perfetti), Richie’s new boyfriend, loudly accuse Patrick of being bad for the gays.The movie belongs to Patrick, to an even greater degree than the series did. It’s a bittersweet romantic comedy, with a journey through self-discovery toward love against the backdrop of a wedding. Having fled San Francisco for Denver at the end of the series, following his latest horrible breakup, Patrick returns for the City Hall nuptials of his friends Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Eddie (Daniel Franzese). The action consists of a series of encounters — with his old boyfriends Richie (Raul Castillo) and Kevin (Russell Tovey); with a 22-year-old pickup; with Dom — that force Patrick to assess his choices and gently, if not all that realistically, push him toward the one we want him to make.
But Patrick was always the show’s most interesting and affecting character. Mr. Groff always made his tics, inconsistencies and operatically scaled mistakes believable, and it’s true again in the film. When Patrick goes home with the 22-year-old — a fellow video-game designer — Mr. Groff shows us both his almost giddy delight during their (quite explicit) sex and, afterward, his reflexive condescension mixed with alarm as the younger man calls him out for running away from his problems.
While it was never at the heart of the show, one of the best things about “Looking” was the rapport of Patrick and the slightly older, much wiser Dom. Likewise, the best thing about the film is a scene between the two of them in which Patrick threatens to make his most destructive mistake yet. It’s a crucial moment — funny and terrifying and difficult to pull off — that seems to come out of nowhere, but Mr. Groff and Mr. Bartlett handle it with casual finesse. In a show about loneliness and friendship, it helps to have two actors who can so easily convince us that they’re the greatest of friends.
It breaks my heart a little when I let myself think of this series being over. Perhaps it's because it showed a different life from heteronormative (how easily the words trip off one's tongue in these times) society's, because I don't fit that life either, because I am single when most people/friends are not, because it's about friendships which has always been my mainstay. I feel this desperate longing for wanting to live more of their lives through more episodes, and to say goodbye and forget about it really hurts.
My friends too have paired up, people are starting/have started families. People are also coming back after years living in other countries: I have people to go to after like an adult life's worth of training in how to not want to be with one's closest friends. But it's also now like this review says: here you are, as prepared for life as you can possibly be, and but where do you go? Do you keep hooking up with people, do you stop because it's lost its relevance? You don't, really, because you do want to have sex and are totally not in the running for shukno mohila. But you also want your Eddie: someone to bitch to, someone to tell when you find something interesting.
I was walking down to the grocery store today evening to buy bread. Without any bags to carry, I walked fast and with a straight back, and my calves felt strong and able. I want to walk as free and strong always and with someone with whom that would not be at odds.
Here's a song from the second season which captures some of what the series is in my head:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/arts/television/looking-the-movie-review.html?_r=0
“Are you all right?” a friend asks the angsty video-game designer Patrick (Jonathan Groff) early in “Looking: The Movie.” It’s the guiding question of the film, one that refers to two inquiries, actually: Are Patrick and his friends, 30- and 40-something gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area, all right with the way greater acceptance — symbolized by legal marriage — is changing their lives? And is Patrick, a narcissistic relationship saboteur, all right as his friends start pairing off for life?
The movie, on HBO on Saturday night, is a delayed finale for “Looking,”which ran for two seasons on the network. Written by the series’s creator, Michael Lannan, and one of its executive producers, Andrew Haigh, who also directed, it has the show’s virtues — its loose, casual vibe, the gorgeous San Francisco locations and the excellent performances by Mr. Groff and by Murray Bartlett, as Patrick’s levelheaded friend Dom.
It also has its faults, including some surprisingly flat acting for an HBO project and a tendency to get dull when the script moves away from the personal and into the larger issues of the gay community. Those glitches are more noticeable in an 85-minute film than they were in half-hour weekly episodes.
The show was criticized during its run for making the promiscuous, neurotic, commitment-phobic Patrick its central character, as if he were standing in for all gay men. The film incorporates and disarms that critique, having the jealous blogger Brady (Chris Perfetti), Richie’s new boyfriend, loudly accuse Patrick of being bad for the gays.The movie belongs to Patrick, to an even greater degree than the series did. It’s a bittersweet romantic comedy, with a journey through self-discovery toward love against the backdrop of a wedding. Having fled San Francisco for Denver at the end of the series, following his latest horrible breakup, Patrick returns for the City Hall nuptials of his friends Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Eddie (Daniel Franzese). The action consists of a series of encounters — with his old boyfriends Richie (Raul Castillo) and Kevin (Russell Tovey); with a 22-year-old pickup; with Dom — that force Patrick to assess his choices and gently, if not all that realistically, push him toward the one we want him to make.
But Patrick was always the show’s most interesting and affecting character. Mr. Groff always made his tics, inconsistencies and operatically scaled mistakes believable, and it’s true again in the film. When Patrick goes home with the 22-year-old — a fellow video-game designer — Mr. Groff shows us both his almost giddy delight during their (quite explicit) sex and, afterward, his reflexive condescension mixed with alarm as the younger man calls him out for running away from his problems.
While it was never at the heart of the show, one of the best things about “Looking” was the rapport of Patrick and the slightly older, much wiser Dom. Likewise, the best thing about the film is a scene between the two of them in which Patrick threatens to make his most destructive mistake yet. It’s a crucial moment — funny and terrifying and difficult to pull off — that seems to come out of nowhere, but Mr. Groff and Mr. Bartlett handle it with casual finesse. In a show about loneliness and friendship, it helps to have two actors who can so easily convince us that they’re the greatest of friends.
It breaks my heart a little when I let myself think of this series being over. Perhaps it's because it showed a different life from heteronormative (how easily the words trip off one's tongue in these times) society's, because I don't fit that life either, because I am single when most people/friends are not, because it's about friendships which has always been my mainstay. I feel this desperate longing for wanting to live more of their lives through more episodes, and to say goodbye and forget about it really hurts.
My friends too have paired up, people are starting/have started families. People are also coming back after years living in other countries: I have people to go to after like an adult life's worth of training in how to not want to be with one's closest friends. But it's also now like this review says: here you are, as prepared for life as you can possibly be, and but where do you go? Do you keep hooking up with people, do you stop because it's lost its relevance? You don't, really, because you do want to have sex and are totally not in the running for shukno mohila. But you also want your Eddie: someone to bitch to, someone to tell when you find something interesting.
I was walking down to the grocery store today evening to buy bread. Without any bags to carry, I walked fast and with a straight back, and my calves felt strong and able. I want to walk as free and strong always and with someone with whom that would not be at odds.
Here's a song from the second season which captures some of what the series is in my head:
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