Danny Collins

First Hit:  I really enjoyed the film mostly because of the music followed closely the characters.

Danny (Al Pacino) is an aging rock and roll star that sings his and other’s old songs to an aging audience that love his old songs. It is just for the money.

He’s still into drugs and drinking while seeing the irony of having a young fiancé. She’s with him for the money and drugs. On his birthday his manager Frank Grubman (Christopher Plummer) gives him a letter written to him by his all-time hero, John Lennon.

Frank bought this 40 year old letter for Danny after tracking it down to a collector. Danny is overwhelmed by the gift, and decides he needs to change his life. So he moves into a hotel in New Jersey being managed by Mary Sinclair (Annette Bening). They have great banter and the chemistry is palpable. Besides getting rid of his drugs and trying to write new songs, he wants to visit his son Tom Donnelly (Bobby Cannavale) whom he’s never met.

His son doesn’t care one iota about him and wants him out of his life. His daughter Hope (Giselle Eisenberg) is ADHD and through her Danny tries to find a way back into his son’s heart. This film is about the difficulties of redemption, forgiveness, growing, and letting go.

Pacino is pretty good, and although there are times I felt he was over milking the part, other times he appeared clued into the role and was creating a wonderful character. Bening was wonderful. She was a great foil for Pacino’s role. Plummer was fantastic. Cannavale was superior as the son who was both angry and happy to meet his father. The star of this film was Eisenberg. She was amazing. Dan Fogelman wrote and directed this film. His use of the John Lennon music was absolutely perfect. The other stories that make up this film were strong.

Overall:  I thoroughly enjoyed the film and it was the music that got me fully engaged.

Blue Jasmine

First Hit:  Wasn’t impressed with overall script but thought Cate Blanchett was amazing to watch.

For some reason the film doesn't delve too much into the cause of everyone's anguish; the defining event being the arrest and prosecution of Hal (Alec Baldwin) for deceiving all his family and friends with investment schemes that ruin their lives.

Therefore, I found it hard to "get" that Hal actually had the smarts to be deceitful. Despite this obvious slight of hand, the prominent focus of this film is the subject of lying and self deceit. His wife, Jasmine (Blanchett), is the cause of his fall from grace because she deceived herself by ignoring until she decided to call him out.

As Blanchett as the vehicle of the story, director and writer Woody Allen hopes you forgive the lack of background and gives you snippets of the past by having Jasmine zone out into an alternate reality to fill in the story. In much of the film, it works well enough, but in other aspects it doesn’t. Jasmine blames Hal for her current life of no money and no friends, while taking no responsibility for any of it herself.

Arriving at her sister Ginger’s (Sally Hawkins) in the semi-downtrodden neighborhood on South Van Ness in San Francisco, she is lost and wants to try to make something out of her life. The story is that she spent time in a mental hospital after being found talking to herself on the streets of New York City. The first lie she tells her sister is that she flew to SF in first class; the scene showing her in her seat we can easily see she wasn’t in the first class section at all. She cannot let go of the life she use to have.

Throughout the film we watch Jasmine fade in and out of past stories and her current reality. In the end we don't really know the truth of whether she was complicit in her husbands story or just didn't want to accept the truth as her reality.

For the most part Blanchett was very good and I also felt she was limited by the script. Baldwin wasn’t very believable as the master manipulator. Hopkins was superb. She was refreshing, alive and well suited to the role. Andrew Dice Clay, as Ginger’s former husband Augie, especially in his first scene, seemed like he was reading script and didn’t embody the character very well. Bobby Cannavale as Chili was very engaged in his character and was fun to watch. Allen wrote and directed this effort. The background was week and made believability of the story weak. He got some strong performances out of Cannavale, Blanchett and Hawkins.

Overall:  Not Allen’s best but not his worst either.