If only the Zeitgeist-targeted jokes about CD players and hair gel were funnier. At least this time around, we get a soundtrack full of early-aughts-nostalgia cuts deployed with a winning mix of ironic remove and real affection - from Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” to Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” and the coup de grâce, “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus. In the case of this doubly high-concept comedy, the mind drifts to the image of a screenwriter explaining to a roomful of Netflix executives, through a thick Swedish accent, “It’s Groundhog Day meets 13 Going on 30!” In fewer than ten words, we perfectly understand the story of a washed-up 40-year-old magically sent back to relive her glory days - or rather, one glory day specifically, as she repeatedly wakes up in her adolescent body (played by Hedda Stiernstedt) on her 18th birthday until she learns a valuable lesson - though this one pertains less to living a decent life and more to fine-tuning one’s gaydar. With some movies, you can hear the pitch meeting while you watch them. Amanda and her beau frolic in some ravishing locations, but the natural splendor is a little less inviting when it’s pitched to us so overtly. Her efforts, instead, focus on providing a rosier image of Vietnam not marred by the tragic heft of war. But screenwriter Eirene Tran Donohue doesn’t mine satire from Amanda’s transformative affaire de coeur with a local hunk (Scott Ly). Amanda ( Josie and the Pussycats’ Rachael Leigh Cook) arrives in the country as the representative of an American tourism company soon to set up shop in Hanoi, tasked with taking in the local beauty and repackaging its appeal for the white American market. Of the many, many Eat Pray Love knockoffs native to the Netflix library, none makes its exotified perspective into text quite so cannily as this rom-com sending our wayward white woman for some self-discovery in Vietnam. ![]() Eminently correct as Echikunwoke’s point about Black women’s voices being ignored by the medical establishment may be, she beats us over the head with it like the faceless specter brutalizing Gemina. This traumatic event haunts her in the form of a hooded figure committing sadistic acts of violence - a metaphor disassembled in the final minute as a twist making its significance literal to the point of heavy-handedness. Gemina (Alexis Louder) tells her doctor that something doesn’t feel right during childbirth, though her complaint goes unheard, and the ailment causes her to miscarry. Lopez makes us believe it.Īctor turned writer-director Megalyn Echikunwoke condenses a lot of pain into 20 minutes for one of the rare Netflix-fronted short-form releases. Coming from anyone else, the played-straight writing about motherhood unlocking a dormant potential sufficient to lift a car would sound goofy. ![]() ![]() While she plays broad, well-trod character beats in a register ever so slightly aware of its own movie-ness, she does so with such conviction that the viewer cheers her triumphs and mourns her struggles. Setting aside the physical aspect - this woman is seemingly impervious to the ravages of time - she has that unique movie-star aptitude for getting us onboard with her every emotion. ![]() Gael García Bernal has some fun as a crime boss targeting this ferocious mama bear’s cubs, and director Niki Caro shows strong fundamentals in orchestrating action from beneath the visual muck of Netflix’s house style, but it’s Lopez who runs the show here. After Jenny From the Block kicks off Netflix’s in-house movie programming for the summer, read on for the rest of the original titles added this month.Īs a nameless, unparalleled mercenary lured out of retirement by the mission to rescue her daughter, Jennifer Lopez is a mother in a less colloquial sense than usual in this potboiler elevated by her raw magnetism. Netflix subscribers can get a taste of true movie stardom from the comfort of their sofas, and this month offers a better-than-average cop drama in from Tollywood (of RRR fame), a poignant and polarizing short film with Big Themes, a Vietnamese getaway somewhat self-aware of its thorny politics, and, of course, the long-awaited follow-up to Norwegian date-night selection Royalteen. “ Jennifer Lopez stars in The Mother” is a beautiful sentence - both in the Keatsian sense of being true (J.Lo does kick ass all over the new thriller from director Niki Caro) and that it is right that Jennifer Lopez starring in a film called The Mother indicates a healthy film industry functioning as designed. Photo: Eric Milner/Netflix/Eric Milner/Netflix
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