KLMNO
Style
SATURDAy, NOvEMbER 9 , 2019. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STyLE EZ RE C
A holiday rom-com
with Emilia Clarke,
Henry Golding,
Emma Thompson
and Michelle Yeoh.
What could go
wrong? Everything,
the critics say,
as they burn the
Christmas turkey.BY EMILY YAHRThe reviews are in for “Last Christmas,” and
many of them are... not kind. Let’s let a few
critics weigh in:
Rolling stone: “Incredibly, shockingly, monu-
mentally bad.... The kind of bad that you get
when you bring together people of enormous
talent and then are forced to watch them flail
around, lost and flop-sweat desperate, attempt-
ing to make a romantic comedy that is mind-bog-
glingly short of both elements.”
new York Post: “ ‘Last Christmas’ isn’t p articular-
ly funny, or romantic. And the film’s twist ending,
which many viewers accurately guessed after
watching the trailer, is i diotic and poorly e xplained.”
Us Weekly: “A n aimless, overstuffed mess with
glaring identity issues, it will yield little joy
during this festive season.”
BBC: “A brutally unfunny and contrived ro-
mantic comedy.”
entertainment Weekly: “A supernatural twist
so ludicrous it may actually make you want to
punch a reindeer.”Stink, stank, stunk
And so on. The film is sitting at a less than
50 percent rating on Rotten To matoes. What went
so wrong with this movie?
on the surface, “Last Christmas” looked like a
charming holiday season offering starring the
delightful emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) and
Henry Golding (“Crazy Rich Asians”) as Kate and
To m, a pair of unlikely soul mates. Plus, the script
was co-written by the beloved emma Thompson;
the soundtrack is exclusively George Michael
songs as an homage to the late singer; and it stars
the great Michelle Yeoh as a woman named santa,
the quirky owner of a year-round Christmas shop
in London.
overall? The movie’s biggest flaw is simply the
fact that it’s a Christmas rom-com that is, in fact,
lacking in love and humor (and Christmas).
Yes, the film is set during the holiday season,
and Kate spends most of the time running around
in an elf costume (“An outfit she keeps on even
when she’s off the clock for some bizarre, unex-
plained reason,” as the Guardian put it) because
she works at s anta’s Christmas store. And the plot
see cHrIstmAs on c2JONATHAN PRIME/UNIVERSAL PICTURESemilia clarke and Henry Golding star in “Last christmas,” which, for a rom-com,
i s neither romantic nor funny and, for a christmas movie, is utterly devoid of joy.Hysterical
actions
about their
daughters
surely we can all
agree that it’s
really weird for a
man to escort his
adult daughter on
an annual
pilgrimage to the
gynecologist to
assess whether
her hymen is still intact. or —
terrifyingly! — maybe we can’t
agree on this, since a 2016
survey of 288 American oB-
GYns revealed that 10 percent
of them had been asked by
female patients or their family
members to perform medically
absurd “virginity tests.”
But surely we can agree that
this man capping the visit by
demanding the doctor “give me
my results expeditiously” i s a
terrifying and hilarious move.
Beginning with “expeditiously,”
as if the fate of the universe
hinges on how quickly a father
can get read in on the status on
his daughter’s hymen, a thin
piece of tissue that is as likely to
tear during a bicycle ride as a
sexual encounter. And ending
with “my results,” as if the vagina
in question belonged to the dude
in question, as if it were a joint
checking account.
Anyway! We are talking,
obviously, about T.I., the rapper
and actor, who told a podcast
this week that he engaged in this
practice and who was then
immediately hit with the slap-
down that such behavior
deserved. everyone from
Planned Parenthood to Rolling
stone responded with horror,
and T.I.’s daughter — the one
he’d claimed had “no problem”
with the ritual — proceeded to
hit “like” on a variety of tweets
critical of her father.
shame delivered, problem
solved.
except that T.I.’s impulse
didn’t come from nowhere.
nobody wakes up one morning
and spontaneously decides that
good parenting requires latex
gloves and stirrups, with an end
goal of... what, exactly?
see Hesse on c2Monica
HesseBY SONIA RAOAmong the many movie quotes
repurposed into memes is that
from “Jurassic Park,” uttered by
Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm:
“Your scientists were so preoccu-
pied with whether or not they
could that they didn’t stop to
think if they should.” He meant it
in reference to the park full of
dinosaurs, of course, but the sen-
timent has filtered into all sorts of
ethical debates since — this week,
one spurred by another movie.
The production company Mag-
ic City Films announced Wednes-
day that it would be digitally
re-creating James Dean, the leg-
endary actor who died in a 1955
car crash at a ge 2 4, for the coming
film “Finding Jack.” The Holly-
wood Reporter states that Dean
will play a “secondary lead role”
in the project, adapted from Ga-
reth Crocker’s novel about the
thousands of military dogs aban-
doned at the end of the Vietnam
War.
south African filmmaker An-
ton ernst, who will direct the film
alongside Ta ti Golykh, told the
publication: “We searched high
see deAn on c2No cause
for a virtual
James Dean,
some say
by a creative team having identi-
fied someone perfectly suited to
the role. Warren has that extra
something — the rare gene on the
e! chromosome, for entertainer,
maybe? — that separates a work-
manlike portrayal from a great
one.
Twenty-four songs make up
the bulk of “Tina’s” appeal, with
“Proud Mary,” “Private Dancer,”
“What’s Love Got to Do With It”
among them. Under Phyllida
Lloyd’s direction, with an indis-
pensable assist from choreogra-
pher Anthony Van Laast, the
musical sequences give the neces-
sary ticket-buying rationale to
Turner fans and neophytes alike.
A formula-driven book by Katori
Hall, Frank Ketelaar and Kees
Prins accompanies those other
more exciting ingredients, focus-
ing on Turner’s rejection by her
mother, Zelma (Dawnn Lewis),
and physical abuse at the hands
of her mentor-husband, Ike
(Daniel J. Watts).
You’ll sit with patient, folded
hands through the dialogue
see tHeAter reVIew on c4BY PETER MARKSnew york — Any critical assess-
ment of “Tina,” the new Broad-
way musical superheated by the
sizzling essence of Tina Turner,
begins and ends with another
dazzling entity by the name of
Adrienne Warren.
Truly, all you need to know
about this by-the-book jukebox
show, which marked its official
opening Thursday at the Lunt-
Fontanne Theatre, has to do with
Warren’s earth-moving gifts.
Hers isn’t s o much a performance
as an eruption. Blessed with ex-
traordinary pipes, restless grace
and a star’s joy of center stage,
Warren creates the impression of
being as good a Tina Turner as,
well, Tina Turner.
Yes, that is an illusion, but as
illusions go, this one’s worth
buying into. Turner herself is one
of the show’s producers, and one
imagines the hagiography en-
demic to this reverential genre
wasn’t the only aspect of the
venture that appealed to her. It
had to be the honor accorded her
THEATER REVIEWEvery song in Broadway’s Tina Turner jukebox is A1
MANUEL HARLAN/LUNT-FONTANNE THEATRE
You’ll go into the musical “tina” as a tina turner fan, and you’ll leave as an Adrienne warren fan, too.BERT REISFELD SAMSUNG/PA WIRE/PRESS
ASSOCIATION IMAGESActor James dean died in 1955.