Soundtracking: "Tully"

by Chris Feil

Despite being the most isolated character study of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s collaboration, Tully still makes space for a subtle musical world inside its protagonist’s head. Tully is a story about motherhood and mental health, taking some big narrative risks as it moves towards healing. When music trickles in, it offers its own kind of mindful balm attuned to the psyche of Charlize Theron’s Marlo. It’s the most musically subtle of the Cody/Reitman empathy trilogy, but no less effective...

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Ranking Tully's Figures of Speech

Seven years after fucking up Charlize Theron’s silk, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody teamed up again to fuck up just about every other fabric in her house in this year’s Tully. Here Theron plays Marlo, a soon-to-be mommy of three struggling to find any room for excitement or naps in her caffeine-deprived days. Enter Tully (Mackenzie Davis), the night nanny she hires to add some hours of sleep to her frustrations.

From the opening scene, Cody assures the audience she has no intention of grounding these characters in the reality that corresponds to them. Her script keeps this up throughout by frequently using figures of speech and occasional underwater reveries to buoy up the characters in their imagination. She reinforces the fantasies her script's players construct and dress themselves up in (from Tahitian home bars to cat ears headbands) with an equally rhetorical language. We've ranked enough of our favorite metaphors and similes from Tully that we can already hear the wheels of your high school English teacher’s TV cart rolling up to your classroom.

Ten of our favorite lines and very wet spoilers after the cut...

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Podcast: Disobedience and Tully

An intimate convo this week as Nathaniel R and Nick Davis discuss recent flicks. This was recorded right before Nathaniel's birthday but we are late uploading it. Here it is now for your enjoyment. Lots of Tully and Disobedience talk (among other films) all without spoilers if you haven't yet caught those early release gems!

Index (40 minutes)
00:01 Silliness about Nathaniel's Birthday
03:30 Favorites of 2018 thus far including Diablo Cody & Charlize Theron's brilliance in Tully
10:25 A long anedcote-filled conversation about Sebastian Lelio's Disobedience starring Rachel Weisz. It's quite discussable from a number of angles
25:00 On Chesil Beach, Deadpool 2 and Ready Player One
30:15 Let the Sunshine In, and Grace Jones, Bloodlight and Bami
34:45 More randomness including Book Club and the exquisite beauty of Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Disobedience, Tully, Ready Player One

Blueprints: "Tully"

For this upcoming Mother’s Day weekend, Jorge takes a look at the depictions of the hardships of motherhood in Diablo Cody and Jason’s Reitman’s latest joint.

At this point it may be an overstatement, but motherhood is not easy. As it turns out, taking care of another, much smaller living and breathing human being requires more time, attention and energy than one sole human being is able to provide. Tully, among many other things, is an examination of the mental toll that motherhood takes on a person.

Let’s take a look at the tools that Diablo Cody’s script uses to portray the everyday hassle, tediousness and exhaustion that Charlize Theron’s Marlo has to endure, before Tully comes in and rescues her...

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Review: "Tully"

by Chris Feil

With Juno, screenwritwer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman made a quippy comedy on teen pregnancy with more subtlety than first meets the eye. Pairing again for Young Adult, they approached the bitter delusion of its alcoholic protagonist with patient and understated compassion. Now arrives their third collaboration Tully, an equally gracious and hilarious look at personal growth and self-awareness, this time with motherhood at the forefront.

It’s a special thing when we get even one great comedy with such a deep well of empathy for its subject, but Cody and Reitman have gifted us with an unimpeachable trilogy on empathy that challenges audience bias. And Tully is their riskiest entry yet.

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