Two nightmares in Manhattan
Why I probably won't revisit Daddio, a movie about a Manhattan cab driver and his fare, or A Quiet Place: Day One, a movie about a Manhattan alien invasion and a cat.
I’m surfacing from heavy, daily work on my next book in order to report about a couple of movies I saw during brief breaks from that writing.
Unfortunately, these films — both of which involve two travelers trying to find their way through a dark New York night — made me wish I’d spent the time differently.
Let me out of Daddio’s cab
written and directed by Christy Hall
Let me begin by highlighting what I find praise-worthy here:
With each passing year, Sean Penn becomes a more fascinating subject for creative cinematographers. Terrence Malick’s team of camera-wielding superheroes made much of his haunted, harrowed face in The Tree of Life. Here, Phedon Papamichael’s camera feasts on Penn’s weather-scarred visage.
It seems almost too predictable that the child of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith would be so radiant onscreen, and Dakota Johnson is luminous here. It’s as if she’s been waiting her whole career for someone to put her in a car at night for the duration of a film just so we can see how the lights of passing traffic glorify her face.
But this is movie-star glamour we’re talking about in both cases. I wouldn’t ever describe Daddio as a film of visual poetry. Instead, Papamichael’s savoring of the sexy sleekness of the hermetically sealed space is just flashy and entertaining, only occasionally turning to capture the greasy, polluted reality of New York night life for contrast, where we might have found context that could have brought more dimension to the primary drama.
And when it comes to what I admire about this film, well… that all I’ve got.
First-time film director Christy Hall strives to make strong impressions here by framing her film with ambitious limitations. First…
she shows impressive restraint by containing a feature-length drama in one Yellow Cab (although Steven Knight, who wrote and directed Locke with Tom Hardy, made something much more substantial out of this idea, and there was only one person in that car).
Second…
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