Film Review: The Last Five Years

The film adaptation of Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years is remarkably faithful to its source material. That is not necessarily a good thing.

Strictly speaking, this musical (which premiered Off-Broadway in 2002, and was revived in 2013) would not strike anyone as a clear candidate for cinematic treatment. Both the style and the structure are intensely theatrical. Performed in one act, with two characters, and almost entirely sung-through, The Last Five Years chronicles a relationship using a parallel storytelling technique: one story line (the husband's, Jamie) is told chronologically from beginning to end, while the other (the wife's, Cathy) begins at the end of their marriage, and works backwards towards their first date. Despite some issues I have with the story (it's far too kind to Jamie) and the score (Cathy's material is far more interesting, both musically and dramatically), both productions largely worked.

Film Review: Into the Woods

It's not good. It's not bad. It's just nice. And perhaps that's why the long-awaited film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods, which opened Christmas Day, is largely a disappointment. Directed by Rob Marshall, it is slick, stylized, and without much spark, not unlike Marshall's other two high-profile forays into movie musicals, Chicago (2002) and Nine (2009). The sets and costumes are beautiful. The performances are all professional and proficient, some are even great. The pace is spry. Yet the endeavor stops short of being wholly satisfying. It feels strangely empty in a way that even the less-than-perfect stage productions of this musical I've seen over the years never have.