The Week - Jesse Hassenger Latest articles from Jesse Hassenger Sat, 20 Apr 2019 01:58:50 -0400 <![CDATA[How a little secrecy gives Captain Marvel a stronger story]]>













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<![CDATA[The many violent fantasies of Liam Neeson]]>









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<![CDATA[M. Night Shyamalan's Glass is better than you've heard]]>


But here's a Shyamalan twist: Glass is actually pretty good.







]]> Fri, 18 Jan 2019 05:55:00 -0500
<![CDATA[Why Aquaman is so refreshing]]>

The series of movies based on DC Comics superheroes is in terrible trouble, and also enormously successful. This has been the case more or less since 2013, when Warner Bros. reacted to both the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the end of its Christopher Nolan-helmed Batman trilogy by starting its own DC-based cinematic universe. Though they're roundly derided by many critics and fans (and not without cause), most of these DC movies have been financially successful. They do well enough to keep the studio from pulling the plug entirely, with the occasional Wonder Woman triumph chased by the inevitable Justice League disappointment.

Into this fray enters Aquaman, their latest superhero blockbuster, and their first to involve a character without the built-in recognition of Wonder Woman, Superman, or Batman (who made a cameo alongside some of his most famous enemies in Suicide Squad).

Financially, Aquaman will probably not be a turning point, though it will do well enough. But creatively speaking, James Wan's version of Joss Whedon's version of Zack Snyder's version of Aquaman may help with the elusive establishment of a DC house style — or lack thereof.

Initially, DC's thematic and visual sensibilities were yoked tightly to director Zack Snyder, who made Man of Steel and especially Batman v. Superman in a wannabe-deconstructionist mode that made an awkward fit with his formidable but unfocused eye for mythological imagery. Then the company hired Avengers writer-director Joss Whedon to rewrite and reshoot portions of Snyder's Justice League, resulting in a slapdash imitation of the lighter, funnier Marvel style. In the middle of all this was Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman, which took some story cues from Marvel's Thor and Captain America, but struck an appealing middle ground between Snyder's self-seriousness and Marvel's desire to crowd-please.

Aquaman, like Wonder Woman, bears superficial resemblance to Marvel movies: It, too, has elements of Thor, here mixed with the comic-book psychedelia of the second Guardians of the Galaxy. James Wan is also, like Jenkins, a very talented filmmaker whose thematic concerns are not as distinctively or clearly articulated as Snyder's. If anything, this bro-with-a-heart-of-gold take on Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) has been watered down from his supporting appearance in Justice League. He's another semi-reluctant hero torn between two worlds who makes quips and butts heads with a more serious-minded lady equivalent of himself (Mera, a warrior princess well-played by Amber Heard). His origins, as the offspring of a human and undersea-dwelling Atlantean royalty (guess which one Nicole Kidman plays), are relatively humble, and his destiny is predictably grandiose.

Stylistically, though, Aquaman looks nothing like any of this year's other superhero offerings. It's awash in purples, pinks, and blues; outfitted in eye-catching costumes (Mera, whose hair is scarlet red, changes from a bright-green catsuit to a jellyfish dress to desert whites); and overflowing with visual effects. Sometimes this stuff is gloriously imaginative, like the designs of its teeming, glowing underwater cities. Sometimes it's surprisingly chintzy, like Aquaman and Mera's heavily green-screened surface-world detour to Sicily. And sometimes the movie manages both at once, like when underwater factions battle each other astride sharks and sea-dragons in a kind of Avatar/Phantom Menace fantasia. It would not be accurate to call the movie's effects “convincing.” But they are memorable, even sometimes beautiful in their garish weirdness.

Wan doesn't just stand back and goggle at the world-hopping production design; he moves his computer like he's playing around with a simulator, computerizing impossible videogame angles and the trademark rapid camera-tilt effect he used in his Fast and Furious movie from a few years ago. As a stylist, he's not as forward-thinking as the Wachowskis (that they haven't yet been handed a DC movie seems a ridiculous oversight), but he engineers a similar much-ness.

“Too much” is standard business for a lot of blockbusters, and Aquaman is eventually exhausting. But like the just-released Sony cartoon Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse, the movie is energized by the possibilities of tackling the sheer weirdness of superhero comics, rather than tasked with grounding them for less comics-friendly audiences.

On its own, splattering crazy, brightly colored special effects across the screen isn't a sustainable blueprint for future DC movies. But Aquaman's delightful silliness does point to what these movies should have been doing all along: standing alone, rather than trying to reconcile the weird worlds of its various heroes for premature team-ups.

Aquaman and Wonder Woman, the two best entries in this series so far, both tell fish-out-of-water stories, tie superheroics into ancient gods and myths, and utilize some palace intrigue alongside their rom-com bantering. Yet even without a clear Nolan or Snyder-style imprint, they don't look or feel especially similar, to their great advantage.

The Marvel house style turns some of its movies into enjoyable clockwork exercises. Maybe DC's new thing should be crazy inconsistency.

]]> Thu, 20 Dec 2018 05:35:02 -0500
<![CDATA[Is the Fantastic Beasts franchise for adults or children?]]>

The strangest thing about Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald — the latest film set in the Harry Potter universe, out Friday — is how adult it wants to be.

Just as the Potter books and films aged up with their young audience when they were first released, the Beasts pictures are darker, both visually and narratively — especially compared to the family fun of the first few Harry Potter movies. It's rare to see a kid-centric series leave childhood behind so fully. The two Beasts even break from the later, darker Potter movies by following an all-adult cast.

The first movie in the series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, was originally billed as an adventure story about Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) trying to locate various magical beasts in the United States. But audiences hardly had time to say Blast-Ended Skrewt before the first movie veered into stopping the world-threatening menace of the fascist wizard Grindelwald (Johnny Depp). Now, as the latest title clues you in, the series has pretty much abandoned finding fantastic beasts altogether in favor of finding, well, Nazis. What started as a light-hearted safari has become nothing less than the start of a wizardly world war.

A few kids do pop up in Grindelwald, but only when the movie makes a return trip to Hogwarts, the wizarding school where most of the original series is set. It ostensibly travels there to check in with a younger version of Harry's mysterious mentor Dumbledore (here played by Jude Law), but the film makes time for a few student-wizard reaction shots as well as flashbacks to the schooling of Scamander and his lost love Leta Lestrange (played as an adult by Zoe Kravitz), now engaged to Newt's straight-laced brother.

These romantic conflicts only serve to underline how uncomfortable Potter author and Beasts screenwriter J.K. Rowling is with adult relationships in this universe. The first film paired Newt with American auror Tina (Katherine Waterston), and Tina's sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) with Newt's unlikely, regular-human sidekick Jacob (Dan Fogler). Grindelwald spends a lot of time methodically undoing any progress those relationships made by the end of its predecessor, separating characters so it can engineer eventual reunions (and sometimes additional separations). It's not unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe's weird aversion to romance, only without that series' baseline charm.

There's also unresolved tension between Grindelwald and Dumbledore. Rowling has said — outside of her actual texts or films — that the two wizards once shared some kind of romantic relationship, albeit possibly one-sided (Dumbledore's homosexuality being canon written in invisible ink). Yet any romantic feelings Dumbledore has in the movie are kept to lightly innuendo-laden glances and barely-there subtext. Why, exactly? To protect the innocence of young children who are watching a murkily shot PG-13 movie about grownups killing each other?

The movie doesn't need a gay romance to work, but attention to that kind of emotional nuance would immediately set the film apart from its predecessors. It's possible that Rowling and director David Yates are saving that material for a later film, fitting the Fantastic Beasts strategy of endless teasing, but it's hard to say.

Dumbledore's continued closeting may have less to do with overcautious studio executives (though there is that) than the fact that all of Rowling's relationships have the anti-chemistry of fumbling childhood sweethearts in adult bodies, as if a bunch of younger Potter characters took a strong dose of polyjuice potion. Redmayne's Newt, the supposed heart of this new series, seems designed to read as somewhere on the spectrum, but the actor's mannered overplaying is both showy and reductive. Newt — and for that matter, most of the characters — are vaguely childlike without a sense of wonder. If the heroes are going to be this repressed and recessive, this devoid of an adult sensibility, why not just make them kids in the first place?


]]> Fri, 16 Nov 2018 05:45:01 -0500
<![CDATA[Action stars are loving video-on-demand]]>

This may come as some surprise but over the past five years Gerard Butler has made about half as many movie as Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis. The latter two aging action stars have both appeared in about 20 movies each, while Butler has acted in a comparably paltry nine, including this weekend's Hunter Killer, a semi-polished but low-rent potboiler about a U.S. submarine involved in rescuing a Russian president from a military coup that could start World War III.

Why do these numbers feel wrong? A skim of IMBD shows that all three stars are making similar types of movies: lots of cop pictures, action pictures, military or military-adjacent pictures. The big difference between Butler and his older counterparts — and why Cage and Willis' output feels so surprising — is in how these movies are released. Most of Butler's movies, even the smaller ones, have been theatrical features. Most of those recent Willis and Cage movies have been gone straight to VOD — video-on-demand, the streaming equivalent of direct-to-video — sometimes accompanied by a regional and/or contractually obligated one-week stint in theaters.

The practice of older stars bypassing mainstream theaters and heading directly to home entertainment isn't new, of course. It's been common practice for decades, as any number of faded action stars could tell you. But Willis and Cage (and other VOD-friendly performers like John Travolta or Wesley Snipes) were bigger stars for a longer period than, say, Jean-Claude Van Damme — or Gerard Butler, for that matter.

Butler's Hunter Killer suggests that the line between movie star and VOD attraction is thinning and blurring more than ever. It comes to its 2,700-screen wide release through Summit Premiere, a direct-to-video-sounding subsidiary of Summit Entertainment (itself a division of Lionsgate), and was co-produced with Millennium Entertainment, which has made plenty of late-period Cage vehicles that barely hit theaters.

Beyond its pedigree, Hunter Killer itself suggests it's only a simulation of a "real" movie. It's professionally made, but not especially skillful. It's diverting, but not wildly entertaining. Dumb, but not insulting. What makes it feel most like a facsimile though is its variety of points of view, as it follows Butler's sub commander and crew, a smaller team of U.S. military forces on a top-secret mission, the obligatory control room back home, and even some Russians-only intrigue. The number of poorly intercut storylines feels like an unwieldy compromise to secure the participation of its actors. Gary Oldman will appear if he can shoot all of his material in a couple of days, in a handful of rooms. Linda Cardellini and Common will do it if they get to play high-ranking intelligence officials instead of love interests. Gerard Butler will do his machismo thing with the bad American accent, but not participate in any heavy action scenes.

Hunter Killer is not appreciably worse than plenty of straight-to-VOD movies, and for that matter better than many theatrical releases (Butler's Olympus Has Fallen series, for example, is both chintzier and stupider). But it's the kind of film that can make the whole system feel arbitrary. Is Gerard Butler a movie star or not? He probably holds less overall name recognition than Willis or Cage, but he's appeared in more hits over the past decade despite scarcely showing better taste or judgment. Is Hunter Killer an old-fashioned B-movie or a failed blockbuster?

Further complicating these questions is the possibility of a VOD exploitation title accidentally becoming a hit. That's not to say that Mandy, a psychedelic revenge thriller starring Cage that came out last month, wasn't ever intended to be good; the director clearly has some chops, and Cage gives one of his best recent performances. But this bloody, nutty, passionate movie attracted such cult buzz that a token theatrical engagement, simultaneous with its VOD debut, morphed into something more like an arthouse release, with moviegoers requesting the movie and theaters requesting more bookings. It's still a small movie, one that never played on more than 100 screens and will probably make less theatrically than Hunter Killer will make on its opening day. But it will do more to burnish Cage's reputation than any of Butler's recent films.

This won't get the next half-dozen Cage projects back into thousands of theaters — or exile Butler from his big-screen career. As strange as it is to see someone like Cage or Willis devote most of their time to VOD programmers, the blurriness of that line makes it easy to step across in either direction, sometimes repeatedly (or even unknowingly). Netflix Originals (granted, a flashier cousin to VOD movies about dirty cops or vengeance-seeking husbands) have corralled Brad Pitt and Will Smith into movies that never had much or any theatrical release.

Sometimes this is used as evidence that star power is on the wane, and it certainly makes the calculus of supposed star worth trickier to perform than ever. But in a way, these difficulties are indicative of a star surplus, not a shortage. Actors don't retire as frequently or early as they did half a century ago, and if Cage or Willis or Travolta have lost some (okay, a lot) of big-name luster, they're still household names. They've chosen to use those names to remain in leading roles as often as possible, even if some of the vehicles are subpar. Doing VOD can certainly feel like a waste of their considerable talents, but it won't keep them from appearing in the occasional studio film or booking a prestige TV show if they decide to go that route.

Maybe Butler, Oldman, and the other name actors inexplicably in Hunter Killer aren't slumming in a thriller that just barely escaped VOD; maybe they're just trying to keep moving.

]]> Fri, 26 Oct 2018 05:35:01 -0400
<![CDATA[The Hate U Give shows how teen movies are growing up]]>

Teen movies have existed for decades, but the past 10 years or so have introduced a major feeder into the genre: young adult novels. Whether fantastical, romantic, or down-to-earth, these adaptations trade the endlessly referential John Hughes piety of late 1990s/early 2000s teen movies for fidelity to their oft-beloved source materials. The resulting movies are more plugged in than ever to a sense of what their audience wants, but only occasionally inspired.

The Hate U Give, which opens in wide release this weekend, doesn't avoid all of those pitfalls. Over 132 sprawling minutes, this adaptation of the 2017 book by Angie Thomas sometimes lumbers with the weight of unnecessary characters and subplots, and sometimes juxtaposes lighter, smaller-scale scenes against bigger moments in ways that halt its narrative momentum. But at its best, George Tillman Jr.'s film has a gravity and forthrightness missing from so many movies aimed at younger audiences.

It also uses its YA appeal to smuggle a genuine drama into American movie theaters — no small feat in a year where most wide-release dramas have doubled as thrillers or romances. The film focuses on Starr (Amandla Stenberg), a teenager who lives with her family in a poor black neighborhood (the fictional Garden Heights) while also attending the posh and mostly white private school Williamson Prep, where she can get the more rigorous education her mother Lisa (Regina Hall) clearly wants for her. Starr's early narration describes the code-switching she goes through between school and her neighborhood, and the filmmaking echoes that process visually: Many of the school scenes are shot with a blue-ish filter that lightens the look of Starr's skin, while the scenes in Garden Heights look richer and more saturated.

While leaving a neighborhood party with her childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith), the kids are pulled over by a cop who wastes little time mistaking Khalil's hairbrush for a weapon and shoots the unarmed teenager dead in the street. Much, though not all, of the movie involves Starr deciding whether to testify in front of a grand jury, and whether that decision will affect her place in Garden Heights or at Williamson, where her (non-black) friends have little real sense of her background.

It's heavy stuff for a teen drama, but it's carried off beautifully by the actors, especially Stenberg, Hall, and Russell Hornsby as Maverick, Starr's ex-gang-member father. The film opens with Maverick sitting his kids down to explain how to behave if they're stopped by cops (hands on the dash, no sudden movements). There's a heartbreaking callback to this moment later in the movie, where a distraught Maverick quizzes his kids again, years later, on these procedures, as powerful a moment as I've seen in a YA film in ages.

As upsetting as it can be to see Starr suffer PTSD and the tragedy of losing a friend so unjustly, The Hate U Give (which takes its title from a Tupac Shakur "THUG LIFE" acronym) is thoughtful, rather than didactic. It communicates even its sharpest points (the inevitable "no angel" B.S. about police-shooting victims; the carelessness of many fair-weather white protesters) with empathy and emotion. Stenberg is also a major find, equally capable in scenes of anguish and scenes of joy.

But the movie's range of emotions and faith in its source material means that it indulges in subplots that probably made more sense on the page, but loom awkwardly behind the film's most compelling moments. Anthony Mackie plays a member of Maverick's former gang, who seems unduly concerned that Khalil's connection to the gang's drug-dealing operations might be exposed. KJ Apa, Riverdale's Archie, plays Starr's highly unconvincing boyfriend, who disappears from the story for large chunks of time. Given Starr's fraught relationship with her other Williamson friends, the boyfriend would have been an easy lift out of the story.

But if The Hate U Give isn't always as sharply cut or graceful as its best scenes, it's still affecting and effective, and something of a milestone for mainstream teen movies. These characters still go to prom, fight with their friends, and come to a better understanding with their parents. What the movie knows all too well is how Starr's blackness, whether in her home neighborhood or her faux-colorblind school, affects those things and brings terrible injustice right to her door. To some viewers, it will feel all too real.

]]> Fri, 19 Oct 2018 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Supervillains are making a comeback]]>

Superhero movies are getting into the bad-guy business.

Venom, a new movie starring a fantastical enemy of Spider-Man but not Spider-Man himself, opens in theaters everywhere this weekend. At the same time, a stand-alone movie about longtime Batman nemesis the Joker continues filming and is due for release this time next year. Even this summer's multi-hero extravaganza Avenger: Infinity War found plenty of screentime for its imposing villain Thanos.

This might look like film studios, nearly two decades into a superhero boom, beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel, turning to villains as they start to run out of novel heroes. But given the number of relative obscurities who have received the big-screen treatment over the past two decades, it's really a wonder that supervillain-centric movies have taken so long to emerge.

The movie supervillain has moved through several phases to arrive at these eventual starring roles. In the 1990s, when the Batman series was basically the only (successful) game in town, it was routine to hire big-name actors like Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jim Carrey, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to ham it up opposite a taciturn Batman. Michael Keaton made underplaying into a viable strategy, but later actors were all but swallowed up by their co-stars. Supervillainy was a scene-stealing game, and the rules were to act as colorfully nutty as possible, whether the character called for it or not (hence Tommy Lee Jones turning Two-Face into a poor man's Joker).

In retrospect, one of the major innovations of the early-2000s superhero movies like Spider-Man and X-Men was not just that they took their material relatively seriously, but that they refocused attention on their heroes. Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine feel more emotionally open than later-period Bruce Waynes like Val Kilmer or George Clooney; it's easy to see how they'd become the basis for two beloved ongoing series. At the same time, superheroes' opponents also underwent a humanization. Ian McKellan's Magneto or Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus have their moments of delicious grandeur, but their madness doesn't radiate evil so much as tragedy. It's no accident that this period of balance produced some of the best superhero movies ever made.

That balance slipped with the advent of Marvel's in-house cinematic universe — specifically with their very first film, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. Downey plays the role, especially in that first Iron Man film, with the same blithe, irreverent energy he brought to previous movies (often, not coincidentally, playing bad guys). It was a natural outgrowth of his persona, but in the context of a superhero movie it represented a bigger shift. How many previous onscreen superheroes got better quips than the bad guy? Does the bad guy in Iron Man have any quips? Do you remember who he even is?

Maybe you do; Downey's nemesis is Oscar-winner Jeff Bridges, after all. But this, too, set a template of sorts: Hire a capable actor to play a bad-guy mirror image of the hero, sometimes distorted to look larger and more imposing for a big climactic fight. Hence the long-standing complaint of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "villain problem." At its best, the MCU has less a paucity of great villains than a surplus of great heroes; is it really a problem that, say, the Captain America movies focus mostly on Captain America? Credit the MCU for realizing a superhero who can hold the screen is more interesting than a villain who can steal it.

That said, it's hard to avoid the house-style sameness of the MCU with such a parade of subpar antagonists; for every Loki, there's the anonymous bad guys of Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Thor: The Dark World, and Captain America: Civil War. One reason Black Panther and Spider-Man: Homecoming stand out among recent superhero pictures is the strength of their unusually empathetic and shaded villains.

So now that supervillains are making a comeback, how does Spider-Man's old foe Venom fare? Not terribly well, as it turns out, in part because the movie has little interesting for him to do when he's not fighting Spider-Man (as he did, in a previous incarnation, at the climax of 2007's Spider-Man 3). Tom Hardy, playing an investigative journalist who is accidentally fused with a superpowered alien symbiote, gives the material his all, playing up the sweaty, addled side of finding yourself with possibly-deadly superpowers. Seeing the twisty, bulgy Venom face (huge tongue, giant teeth, eerie white eyes) repeatedly envelope Hardy has a horrific, pulpy kick.

But Venom (which was made separately from the MCU-produced Spider-Man series) isn't terribly interested in its character's own dark side. Ultimately, the human-alien hybrid spends more time talking about eating people alive than actually eating them. Fair enough that the movie doesn't overindulge the "extreme" comics culture of the '80s and '90s that birthed Venom in the first place, but on the other hand, who is Venom if not an actual bad guy? Here he's subjected to the old superhero routine, eventually fighting another creature who's a bigger, gnarlier version of our (anti) hero.

Making a movie about a supervillain but relieving the audience of any concern about him doing anything worse than killing anonymous (and murderous) henchmen doesn't undermine superhero formulas. Instead, it turns the narrative into even more of a blatant adolescent power fantasy than most superhero stories. Conceptually, Venom is mostly amoral, and there's only the mildest lip service to the notion that Eddie Brock can actually keep him in check (their eventual Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship is more of a gentleman's agreement). Despite Hardy's sweat, the movie winds up confirming that yeah, being Venom would be pretty cool and fun, as long as he eats who you tell him to eat.


]]> Fri, 05 Oct 2018 05:35:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Night School is terrible. But Tiffany Haddish is great.]]>

Tiffany Haddish was a long-time comic and performer before last year's comedy smash Girls Trip propelled her to greater fame and even some award conversations. So it's only natural that it's taken awhile for her inevitable star vehicle to hit theaters. It's also perhaps understandable why some critics took to concern-trolling as they waited: "Tiffany Haddish deserves better," one publication declared, referring to Night School, a movie that no one had yet actually seen.

As it turns out, Haddish does deserve better than Friday's release of Night School, in large part because the movie was clearly designed to show off star Kevin Hart first and everyone else a distant second. Though the movie shares director Malcolm D. Lee and a similarly talented ensemble cast with Girls Trip , it has all the hallmarks of Hart's films: a convoluted story that goes out of its way to paint Hart as an insecure but hard-working go-getter, bad CG-augmented slapstick, pointless but plot-required deception, and unearned swells of sentimentality.

But Night School as well as Haddish's smaller-scale movie The Oath, out on Oct. 12, both offer their newly minted star something interesting to do, even when the movies themselves don't completely work. In Girls Trip, Haddish is the designated comic relief, which in a movie that's already a comedy typically means a character who is more outrageous or more shameless than the others. She's the movie's id, and many of her live TV appearances since her breakthrough have traded on the infectious joy she brings to saying (or seeming to say) whatever's on her mind. So it's a surprise to see that her new movies give her such domesticated roles: In Night School, she's a teacher of high school and adult education. In The Oath, she's a dedicated wife, mother, and voice of reason.

The most compelling aspect of Night School is its refusal to realign Haddish's persona with what looks like a more standard part: the teacher and leader for a class full of misfits studying up to take a GED test. She's more restrained than her anti-authority character in Girls Trip, but Haddish maintains her comic directness to enliven what could have been a dull straight-woman part. Look no further than her response to a query about whether she's a teacher: "No, I'm just a bitch who likes wearing blouses." Not necessarily a funny line on paper, but laugh-out-loud in her delivery.

Beyond the occasionally amusing, often tiresome Kevin Hart hustle and bustle is a neat rebuke to respectability politics: Haddish's character doesn't need to code-switch into a more "white-sounding" voice to be a smart, serious-minded teacher. This shouldn't be a revelatory message from a big-studio comedy, and Night School is plenty regressive in other ways. But Haddish brings the movie such confident energy that it limps whenever she's off screen.

The Oath gives her somewhat less to do, though it's a much smarter comedy. Ike Barinholtz, who also wrote and directed, plays a left-wing family man appalled by a presidential administration not named but clearly modeled closely after the current White House. When the president announces an "optional" patriotic loyalty oath that all citizens are strongly encouraged to sign, he clashes with his more conservative-minded family over Thanksgiving weekend, especially once members of the "CPU" (Citizen Protection Unit) turn up at his home to investigate a complaint (presumably of insufficient loyalty).

It's a strange, bold movie, this combination of dinner-table farce, satirical commentary, and The Purge, and Haddish provides a lot of necessary grounding as Barinholtz's wife, who generally agrees with him politically but finds his parents and brother far less intolerable than he does. She's involved in a twist that's both telegraphed and eventually inessential to the plot; the only reason her big moments work is the genuine emotion she brings to them. Haddish is funny in the movie, too, burning slower than usual as her frustration with her husband goes from lovingly mild to apoplectic. The movie doesn't tamp her down so much as shift the loudest outbursts to Barinholtz, making a point about the impotent fury of a man who is mostly correct but lacks any ideas about how to affect change, or even how to avoid picking unwinnable fights with his family.

The movie uses its cast well, sometimes in counterintuitive ways; Haddish's image doesn't necessarily scream happy homemaker married to annoying white dude, but as with Night School, the part stretches to accommodate her charisma and warmth. The Oath is a little scattershot and ends with a narrative cop-out, but Haddish comes out of it looking more (to borrow a favorite word of hers) ready for stardom than ever. Given the smart turns she gives both of her new roles, it's wonderfully difficult to picture her engaging in the kind of worn-out deception shenanigans Hart gets up to in Night School.

Now it's time for someone to write her a movie that knows this, instead of just stumbling into it.

]]> Fri, 28 Sep 2018 05:45:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Why Predator is the most underappreciated monster franchise of our time]]>

There are now six sci-fi/action movies starring the armored, tendril-sporting alien hunters known as Predators, but it would be a stretch to call them a multiplex fixture. This weekend's release of The Predator trails its immediate predecessor by eight years, a stop-start longevity owed to the big-studio environment that has produced five Terminator movies and only two good ones. The original story being milked endlessly is 1987's Predator, an action-thriller about a team of mercenaries on a jungle mission who are tracked and mostly killed by a mysterious alien with a cloaking device and a variety of gruesomely effective weapons. Only one of the men — naturally it's the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger — makes it out alive.

The 1987 film's status as the only good one won't likely change with this year's The Predator, released Friday and co-written and directed by the original's bit player Shane Black; so far, it's received a mixture of mild fan enthusiasm, shrugs, and derision similar to 2010's Predators. The reviews for the first follow-up, 1990's Predator 2, were even worse.

The simple explanation is that these sequels needlessly complicate the elemental, dialogue-light simplicity of the first film's Arnold-versus-alien skirmish. The less accepted but correct view is that the Predator sequels are, by and large, pretty solid.

Part of this has to do with the inflated reputation of John McTiernan's original, which is a well-directed B-movie that's nonetheless not as taut or entertaining as McTiernan's Die Hard or Schwarzenegger's first two Terminator pictures. It's still easy to scoff that Predator 2 pits the creature against an amped-up but less imposing Danny Glover instead of declaring a rematch with Arnold. But that movie gets its weird, garish energy from forcing Glover's Los Angeles cop to outwit an extraterrestrial foe in a markedly different environment (also, muscles aren't as much of a perquisite as they appear; no one, not even Arnold, beats a Predator by challenging him to a fistfight). It's not as smoothly crafted as McTiernan's film, but director Stephen Hopkins is the kind of '90s journeyman whose work has aged well.

What Predator 2 establishes with its relocation to Los Angeles is the series' willingness to re-arrange its few core elements. Predators goes back to a jungle, but instead of a cohesive merc team, it follows a band of disparate killers abducted from Earth and brought to another planet for survival games, utilizing an eclectic cast (including two Oscar-winning actors) and the confident direction of the underappreciated Nimrod Antal. Antal's film also introduces the idea of feuding amongst different Predator factions and the idea of monstrous Predator-owned, dog-like beasts, both picked up by Black's new movie.

To the indifferent, this might all just read like endless tinkering with shlock. The rotating directors recall a B-movie version of the Alien series, which may be why the Alien vs. Predator offshoots seemed in the Predator's wheelhouse more than the Alien's. But the four core films' modesty (they're all right around 105 minutes) is surprisingly charming for a series about a very tall alien ripping out spinal columns for sport — or, as we learn in The Predator, for additional, more complicated reasons.

Black's film has the most pointlessly elaborate plotting of the series so far, with at least four sets of characters who despite brisk pacing take awhile to get properly entangled. But its ragtag ensemble is so affectionately drawn by Black that the movie's muddled geography during fights and chases doesn't much matter. Olivia Munn plays a tough biologist, Boyd Holbrook leads a team of troubled soldiers who stumble into the path of multiple Predators, and Sterling K. Brown plays the government antagonist tracking the creatures' latest visit to Earth; they all have fun tossing off Black's sardonic quips, and in some cases stealing the Predators' hunting gear, another one of those minor but clever twists on the Predator formula.

This is a funnier, more self-aware installment, with multiple conversations about why the government calls the creature a Predator when it's really “more like a bass hunter.” But the series, with hallmarks more superficial than subtextual, is flexible enough to accommodate this tone shift, and Black's love for his characters keeps the movie from becoming a one-kill-at-a-time slasher. He even wrings some touching material out of people grappling variously with PTSD, Tourette's, and autism, though its depictions of all three are conveniently movie-ish, which is to say quip-friendly.

The Predators themselves get to show off some new tricks while remaining mostly unsympathetic. As monsters, they're not as expressive as, say, the Universal classics, but while there's not a Predator movie on par with the likes of Bride of Frankenstein or Dracula, it still shares a kinship with those series. The Predators are grotesque figures that are more humanoid in appearance and action than plenty of other contemporary movie aliens. They're durable.

That's why the very end of The Predator, which ignores several of its major characters in order to tease another sequel, feels like a bum, redundant note. There's no need to promise more Predator movies. There will always be more Predator movies. Some franchises run themselves into the ground, but Predator's resilient shlockiness is what makes it so much fun.

]]> Thu, 13 Sep 2018 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Support the Girls is one of the best movies ever about work]]>

It's the rare movie that shows someone working.








]]> Thu, 23 Aug 2018 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The Meg is a surprisingly fair fight between Jason Statham and a megalodon]]>

What does an old-school action star do in the era of CG superheroes?

Jason Statham turned 50 last year, and while he's still in tremendous shape, he's no longer young or obscure enough to toil away in B-movies, nor is he quite of the disposition to sign up for superhero duty. Maybe it's only natural that he would pit himself against a special effect, as he does in this week's The Meg, a long-gestating adaptation of a pulp novel about an unearthed prehistoric shark.

Though far from prehistoric, Statham came to movie stardom a little late, after shoring up his physical bona fides as a diver for Britain's national team in the early '90s. He eventually worked his way into satisfying B-pictures like the Transporter trilogy and the Crank films, accruing enough fan cred to get hired into all-star crews for both The Expendables and the later Fast and Furious movies. Statham has a spin-off of the latter series set for next year with Dwayne Johnson, and it will almost certainly be his biggest hit in a starring role.

But outside of cog work in franchises, it's not always easy for an industry that's trying to abandon mid-budget action movies to figure out a place for someone like Jason Statham. Hence the shark.

Acting opposite a CG shark is not necessarily a bad career move. A couple of summers ago, Blake Lively gave one of her best performances in The Shallows, doing a de facto solo act as a young woman trapped on some rocks while a malevolent beast circled. The filmmakers behind The Meg may not have seen The Shallows, and are adapting a book that's been around for 20 years, but when a whale carcass figures into the plot, it's easy to wonder if the bigger (but vaguely cheaper-looking) movie is ripping off the smaller one.

In general, The Meg is more akin to Deep Blue Sea in enthusiastic silliness. It supposes that the Mariana Trench is far deeper than previously imagined, and that Jonas Taylor (Statham) is relatively unsurprised to see a prehistoric megalodon emerge from it, his past suspicions of its existence dismissed as "pressure-induced psychosis." Statham is the kind of actor who makes boilerplate backstory — a rescue mission that went wrong; an old flame whose endangerment will spur him back into action — charming just by playing it straight with a hint of self-awareness.

He turns out to be a better effect than the giant shark, mostly because director Jon Turteltaub, a longtime hand at live-action Disney movies, doesn't have the ruthlessness required to goose either the suspense or the mayhem of a giant-shark movie. When he initially cuts around the full presence of the shark, in faux-Jaws fashion, he just winds up making the creature's early attacks look confusing. Later set pieces feel rushed and perfunctory, as if he's desperate to find his way out of them as soon as possible, and he only intermittently gets a handle on the sheer scale of the creature. This isn't a Disney movie, but it makes bizarre feints toward family-friendliness, resulting in a shark movie with a frustratingly low body count. Statham's Frank Martin from the Transporter series has probably killed more people than this megalodon.

The Meg has its dumb-fun pleasures. Statham does go after the giant shark in that unwavering way that makes it all seem like a surprisingly fair fight. It's neat to see him in the water, winking (intentionally or not) at his history as a diver, and it's downright delightful to hear him quoting Finding Nemo. It's not that the Transporter movies are so much more sophisticated than this one. But the best Jason Statham vehicles and the best silly monster movies tend to understand that they are dealing at least in part with pulpy wish fulfillment: What if a group of giant sharks got super-smart and turned on humans? What if Jason Statham had to fight a garage full of goons using only his wits, muscles, and a drum of oil?

The Meg kinda-sorta explains what would happen if Jason Statham fought a giant shark. But mostly it asks and answers a different and more familiar question: What happens when a B-movie gets too big?

]]> Thu, 09 Aug 2018 05:35:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Teen Titans Go! is the most satisfying superhero movie of the summer]]>









]]> Thu, 26 Jul 2018 05:35:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Tom Cruise's dogged defiance of time]]>












]]> Wed, 25 Jul 2018 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Does Ant-Man and the Wasp think kissing is icky?]]>












]]> Thu, 05 Jul 2018 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Sicario: Day of the Sad Sequel]]>









]]> Thu, 28 Jun 2018 05:50:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom proves once again there's only one Steven Spielberg]]>

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not directed by Steven Spielberg. This is unsurprising since Spielberg has not directed a dinosaur movie in over 20 years; he made the massive hit Jurassic Park, the somewhat less massive hit sequel The Lost World, and then jumped over to the executive producer role for the next three sequels, including this new one out Thursday. This means that J.A. Bayona, the director of Fallen Kingdom, gets to participate in what has become a Hollywood ritual: the on-the-job search for a director who can at least kinda-sorta do what Spielberg does.

What Spielberg does has, of course, long since expanded beyond his early-career forte of impeccably crafted, energetic, and heartfelt blockbusters like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. But as Spielberg has expanded into war pictures, historical drama, outright family films, and dark sci-fi, his industry has clearly pined for more people who can seamlessly combine special effects and human interest. M. Night Shyamalan enjoyed a moment of speculation, around the time of Signs, that he could wear the crown, but both his subsequent failures and recent successes have revealed him as too idiosyncratic to rule the box office.

Spielberg himself has been involved in the unofficial search, producing for the likes of Robert Zemeckis (who sort of became his own deal with hits like Forest Gump and Cast Away) and Joe Johnston (who hasn't worked quite often enough, despite successes like Captain America: The First Avenger, to cement his status). Spielberg even produced the J.J. Abrams film Super 8, as naked a Spielberg pastiche as ever attempted outside of student films.

Abrams isn't a bad pick; he has a similar eye for casting and clearly makes movies with the audience in mind, even if his movies can feel like an expert cover band. But not every Spielberg protégé can even reach that level; Colin Trevorrow, handpicked to make Jurassic World, delivered both a massive hit and an object lesson in knowing the words but not the music. His Jurassic Park sequel moves at a Spielbergian clip, but both the wonder and the sense of play — the feeling that he loves wielding his camera — is sorely missing. Which brings us to the sequel to that movie, Fallen Kingdom.

At first glance, J.A. Bayona may not seem like an obvious successor, in part because blockbuster filmmaking has trained us to expect the white, male, American director of an indie hit to be promoted too fast and/or beyond his skillset. Bayona, who is Spanish, has made several movies in a mode studios don't always care about: mid-budget pictures with human drama. His The Impossible follows a family in the aftermath of a tsunami, while A Monster Calls uses its fantasy elements to tell the story of a grieving young boy. Neither of them are great movies, but they're well-made, as is his expertly creepy horror film The Orphanage.

It's this kind of genre diversity that's missing from a lot of wannabe Spielbergs, and to the degree that Bayona elevates the very silly Fallen Kingdom, it's because he applies some Spielbergian craft and wit in unexpected places. Part of the film is another island adventure set in the ruins of a dinosaur theme park (albeit with a newly active volcano thrown into the mix), and part of it returns stateside for a weird haunted-mansion/endangered-orphan vibe not far removed from The Orphanage, albeit with way more dinosaurs. Like his other work, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not a great movie. But it's a more inventive bit of ridiculousness than its nostalgia-minded predecessor.

Still, Bayona's set pieces (including a terrific opener that includes a helicopter and an underwater craft) don't quite reach the level of, say, The Lost World. There's a natural ingenuity and adventurousness to Spielberg's technical filmmaking that can't be reproduced just by adding a cute kid or an unexpected emotional moment, as Fallen Kingdom does during a scene of spectacular destruction that's the most dino-sympathetic moment in this entire series.

Bayona is talented, but the gulf between talent and Spielberg-level skills is especially noticeable in a year where Spielberg himself has dipped back into his old game, at least briefly, with Ready Player One. Unlike his best early movies, Player One's human element isn't especially satisfying, but Spielberg hasn't lost a beat on stunning setpieces. There are any number of popular superhero movies with stronger characters than anyone in Ready Player One, but damned if Avengers: Infinity War or Deadpool 2 fail to provide a single action scene as well-directed as the two or three best sequences from Ready Player One. Maybe the fact that Spielberg didn't make a "great Spielberg movie" out of Ready Player One illustrates just how personal his populist-looking skill set actually is. He's had no trouble making more interesting movies out of less traditionally Spielberg-friendly material like Bridge of Spies and The Post.

Ultimately, one of the most admirable things about Spielberg's career — its combination of diversity and productivity — may not be something anyone is all that interested in reproducing.

]]> Thu, 21 Jun 2018 05:50:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Solo marks Star Wars' return to sleaze]]>

The newest entry in the Star Wars series, Solo: A Star Wars Story, has something that other recent entries lacked: sleaze.

This is a relative term, of course. The Star Wars universe continues to be largely devoid of sex, as well as any violence bloody enough to threaten its PG-13 rating. But many of the earlier Star Wars pictures were able to at least create the illusion of sci-fi sleaziness with their glimpses at various facets of the galaxy's criminal underworld.

Han Solo, the titular protagonist of the latest entry, is a major part of this, not because he's a criminal (though technically he is) but because he's first introduced in the original Star Wars in the Mos Eisley cantina, a favored watering hole in that "wretched hive of scum and villainy" and the setting of what became a signature scene for the series. There are few evident heroes in the cantina, and many shady characters of questionable morals; no matter who fires first, Han and bounty hunter Greedo get into a small-scale shootout ending in Greedo's death, and none of the other patrons seem to care.

Later episodes would return to this vision of a galaxy with shady corners. Return of the Jedi opens with a long sequence centered on Star Wars sleaze ambassador Jabba the Hutt, and prequel The Phantom Menace forces the Jedi to negotiate with gambling-addicted slave owner Watto to repair their ship and free young Anakin Skywalker. But when The Force Awakens nods to the original film's cantina scene, it's an act of homage, not an exploration of a seedy underbelly, and The Last Jedi is more concerned with a different sort of amoral character — the richer patrons of the casino on Canto Bight.

Solo: A Star Wars Story, though, has almost nothing to do with the Jedi or the Force, and almost all of it is set on planets with some degree of lawlessness or corruption. Han begins the movie as an almost Oliver Twist-like figure, running low-level jobs for a wormy crime boss and orphan-lord. As promised by earlier Star Wars films, he eventually plays cards with the charming, slick, unscrupulous Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover, staying true to the character's larceny by stealing scenes). Cinematographer Bradford Young shoots many of these planets in low light, accentuating their grubbiness and one-upping the "used" aesthetic George Lucas insisted on applying to the original films.

Solo is not thematically challenging like The Last Jedi, or as gee-whiz charming as The Force Awakens, but chief among its many delights is its journeys into corners of the Star Wars universe where hardly anyone even flicks on a lightsaber, let alone does battle with one. This is a messier and often more mysterious look at this world, where the bad guys are more mean and avaricious than galactically evil. It's a welcome return; characters like Jabba or Watto or the menacing bounty-hunter lineup of Empire Strikes Back made the universe feel more viscerally lived-in, with lives that don't hinge on Jedi-Sith or even Empire-Rebel conflicts.

Yet — without getting into full spoiler territory — Solo can't completely avoid the brewing conflict between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance (it's set about a decade before the events of the original film). That makes sense, but it's also something of a disappointment. As shepherded by consummate company man Ron Howard, Solo feels too distracted by the stakes of its predecessors to fully throw itself into the Star Wars underworld. None of the creatures, for instance, make the same impression as the immense Jabba the Hutt, with his grotesquely wagging tongue and low, sinister laugh.

Still, Solo does an admirable job of imagining some new-yet-dingy corners of the universe, and it's chockablock with instant-classic Star Wars details, like the creepy head in a jar that sings back-up at a villain-packed club, or the light-allergic giant worm that menaces Han early in the film. The fan-service references are a lot of fun, too. It's just a shame that even 10 movies in, when Star Wars dips into the underworld, it always feels obligated to come back up for fresh air.

]]> Thu, 24 May 2018 05:40:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Is this really the end of the Avengers?]]>

Is this really the end? Avengers: Infinity War, released Friday, is the third Avengers movie, the eighth movie to star or co-star Iron Man, and the 19th movie set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is also being promoted, if somewhat indirectly, as a finale of sorts for the popular franchise. But what kind of finale it is remains uncertain.

In the most immediate sense, Infinity War is no finale at all. An untitled fourth Avengers movie is already dated for next May (and two other MCU movies, set before the events of Infinity War, will follow in the meantime). But by bringing together most of the original cinematic Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow), later additions to the team (Scarlet Witch, Vision, Falcon, War Machine), and other solo artists (Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man), alongside the entirely separate Guardians of the Galaxy to stand against intergalactic genocide proponent Thanos (Josh Brolin), Marvel clearly intends to bring matters to a head.

It's difficult to discuss how things come to a head without heading into spoiler territory. Yet the broad outlines of Infinity War are easy enough to communicate: Thanos is collecting cosmic "infinity stones" (yielding power over time, reality, souls, and so on) that, gathered together on his fancy gauntlet, will give him ultimate dominion over the entire universe. He is doing this because he thinks killing half of said universe will ease the burden of overpopulation.

Thanos is a despotic madman, but he may have a point about overpopulation, at least as far as this cinematic universe goes. There are a lot of characters in the MCU, at various stages of their on-screen development. That's one of the serial's great strengths: a deep bench of likable and lovable characters, all played by charming and capable actors, jockeying for screen time. It's a challenge that past Avengers and Avengers-related movies have risen to meet. But as this mega-series rushes to some kind of conclusion, bringing a bunch of sub-series along with it, the MCU team's balancing act, choreographed here by directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, has become a little wobbly.

If the goal is to move at least some of these characters toward closure, Infinity War rushes across the field haphazardly, even at a luxurious 160 minutes. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) feels like he's entering his third or fourth MCU coda by now, having reached a satisfying endpoint five years ago in Iron Man 3. Captain America (Chris Evans), a rich character in his own trilogy, returns to the fray without much to do, though he has more lines than the similarly compelling Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Some newer characters enter this all-star rumble with room still to grow. Spider-Man (Tom Holland) remains earnestly delightful, and Chris Hemsworth's alien-god Thor makes a progression from where he was left in Thor: Ragnarok. Splitting the difference between the goofiness of Ragnarok and the soap opera of earlier Thor movies, he turns out to be a great foil for various Guardians of the Galaxy.

The fun of seeing Thor banter with Rocket Raccoon and Drax doesn't offer much in the way of closure, though. Indeed, the movie's pleasures are found less from any potential finality and more in perpetuation: how the heroes hastily split up and re-combine into new mini-teams in a frantic, interplanetary attempt to stop Thanos. In the moment, that's not a problem — and wouldn't be a problem at all if Infinity War didn't nonetheless insist that this is an "end game," as Doctor Strange calls it at one point.

This portent could be out of a desire to shake up the universe, account for some soon-to-expire actor contracts, or in reaction to the criticism that MCU movies lack real stakes and sometimes feels like an endless succession of origin stories. Most likely it's a combination of all of that. Regardless, the years in origin mode may have left the Russos and their screenwriters ill-equipped to deal with the tricky, ambitious business of wrapping up. Despite some long-promised major character deaths and epic clashes, loose ends dangle carelessly throughout Infinity War. Consider a running mini-subplot about the Hulk and his alter ego Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) that feels like an extended (yet weirdly under-explained) set-up for a payoff that never happens. Is this an intentional subversion of expectations? A semi-permanent change to the character? Or a running gag whose big laugh has simply been deferred another year?

That feeling of deferment creeps in as the movie rockets along. It's entertaining, with plenty of great lines and cool moments, but the promise of the end hasn't made the material automatically weightier, and you get the feeling that maybe the filmmakers assumed it would. Even if this gets a pass as only the beginning of the end, Infinity War is still pretty thin, not least because it barely has a proper ending of its own. Instead, it has a sequel tease disguised as a bold defiance of expectations.

The entire MCU project, connecting a variety of superhero film series into one narrative whole, has sometimes been described as big-screen TV — and at the end of the day, this might be the best way to think of Infinity War. Despite the fact that the movie is clearly part one of two, it does also manage to feel like an unwieldy series finale for a show that's been on the air for a decade-plus — if not in satisfaction than in its confident bloat. The movie has a lot of ground to cover, a lot of time to cover it, and still runs out the clock before finishing even an imitation of a satisfying standalone story.

Maybe this really is a new hybrid of movies and TV: A series finale split in half infinitely, forever working up to a new cataclysmic climax.

]]> Fri, 27 Apr 2018 05:40:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The tween mistakes of Rampage and Truth or Dare]]>

Basing a movie on a game makes a certain amount of sense. Be it board, video, or party, and old game doesn't involve a beloved story to be painstakingly adapted; in some cases, a game provides little more than a premise. Really, they're marketing hooks sharpened by a vaguely comforting sense of nostalgia, which is all that some studios want out of "intellectual property" anyway.

This weekend brings a pair of additions to Game Cinema: Rampage, adapted from the old arcade game about monsters busting up buildings; and Truth or Dare, conceptually riffing off of the non-trademarked party game. Both very much belong to time-honored genres: Rampage is a monster movie as well as a disaster movie; Truth or Dare is a horror movie where a supernatural force stalks a group of young people. But they're similarly interesting in terms of how the games at their center shape and sometimes gender the material.

Of course, plenty of girls played Rampage at the arcade back in the day. But contrary to any number of statistics, gaming is still stereotyped as a male pursuit, and Rampage leans way into that perception. It's not just a movie designed for 12-year-old boys but seemingly by 12-year-old boys, aware of grown-up movie standbys like horrific violence and casual swearing but not especially adept at using them effectively.

It's not surprising that Rampage, in which Dwayne Johnson plays a primatologist whose gorilla bestie George is mutated into a larger, angrier monster and scuffles with a similarly enhanced wolf and crocodile, is a very silly movie. "B-movies with A-movie budgets" has been a much-used description of Hollywood blockbusters for going on two decades, and to an extent it applies here. But like San Andreas, the last movie Johnson made with director Brad Peyton, even the A-movie budget can't disguise how hollow and insubstantial all of the death and destruction feels, even in action-movie terms.

Some of Rampage is still fun, especially when several of the actors (including Jake Lacy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Malin Akerman) chew up the scenery just before the monsters demolish it. A better movie would make them part of the joke; Rampage feels uncertain about whether there is a joke, or if so, what it should be. One character gets eaten by a gigantic crocodile, and Peyton stages it more or less like a mean grown-up getting pushed into a swimming pool in an old Nickelodeon movie. The movie wants to revel in its absurdity, yet never fully lets go of the idea that it could stumble its way into a superior monster-movie style exercise like Kong: Skull Island. That never happens; it's unmistakably a kid movie half-grown into its bad language and body count.

Johnson is the ideal figure to maintain this illusion of an all-ages blockbuster, because he's both a genuine star with clear presence in front of the camera and a barely-adolescent boy's idea of masculinity: Gigantic, muscular, kind to animals without doling out too many hugs, sweaty and bloodied but essentially bulletproof, and girl-adjacent but not really romantic. The filmmakers would probably argue the lack of romance is progressive, but the sidekick status of female lead Naomie Harris doesn't get upgraded just because she and Johnson never kiss. Especially when the movie still has George make sniggering sexual hand gestures about her. It would be a stretch to call Rampage charming (how many 12-year-old boys are?) but it certainly stays true to its tweenage heart.

Like Rampage, Truth or Dare is hardly a gender-exclusive phenomenon. Still, it's probably most commonly associated with young women at slumber parties, as one of the college-aged characters mentions early on. He's part of a mostly-callow group of seniors spending their last spring break in Mexico, lured, with hilarious improbability, to a burnt-out old cathedral, where a stranger nudges them into a round of Truth or Dare that gets a demonic force on their case. Once they're in the game, Olivia (Lucy Hale), her friend Markie (Violett Beane), and their friends must take infinite turns choosing to admit hard truths or perform life-threatening dares.

This is a blatant knockoff of both Final Destination and the artier It Follows, with only a smidge of the former's mordant wit and none of the latter's peerless dread-craft. But Truth or Dare does pay homage to the game's perceived roots through a compelling conflict between Olivia and Markie, lifelong friends who want to stay close "until life tears us apart," as one of them says. The movie is most provocative when poking at Olivia's supposed good-girl selflessness, something that the demonic game puts to the test. How deadly is the gap between your public nobility and your privately selfish feelings?

It's possible that this line of thinking could have been handled more interestingly by a female director. Instead, director and co-writer Jeff Wadlow often filters the female-friendship material through romantic or sexual rivalries, and the movie is too busy with gossipy, salacious, and weirdly obvious twists to dig into its own psychology. Truth or Dare has more to say to its imagined audience than Rampage — and its cynicism about its largely ill-tempered characters is thematic, rather than incidental. But both movies wind up too close to their roots: They're time-passers for girls and boys who don't yet feel comfortable around each other.

]]> Fri, 13 Apr 2018 05:40:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Pacific Rim: Uprising is proof that sequels are running amok]]>

Sequels are as sought-after in Hollywood as ever, but what happens when there aren't enough hit movies to go around?

Studios have reached further and further back, making it clear that just about any cult classic or blockbuster is now game for a follow-up. But even then, the well can start looking dry, especially when costly follow-ups like Blade Runner 2049 turn out to be no more popular in 2017 than the original was in 1982 (beloved, but not by a superhero-sized audience). Boundless appetite for movies about Batman and Iron Man doesn't help the majority of studios who do not have the rights to make movies about Batman or Iron Man.

This helps to explain why a movie like Pacific Rim: Uprising exists. If a studio runs out of big hit movies or beloved classics to sequelize, why not turn to movies that may not have been massive hits and have not yet been anointed classics, but were certainly, well, movies that some people saw.

In the past, the counterpoint has been money. The original Pacific Rim did okay back in 2013, but its box office numbers didn't feel like a mandate to spend more money on a follow-up. But sometimes the money doesn't appear until later. One of the most famous cases is the first Austin Powers movie, which did reasonably well in 1997, only to become a home-video hit and have its sequel quadruple its domestic gross in 1999. More recently, the Keanu Reeves action picture John Wick did solid if unspectacular business in 2015. Lionsgate saw enough interest for a sequel, and John Wick Chapter 2 was a bona fide hit.

Pacific Rim feels different from those movies, though, because there isn't anything particularly scrappy or unlikely about an expensive sci-fi action movie where Godzilla-like monsters attack the globe and humans in enormous robotic armor attempt to fight them off. This despite the fact that the first film was directed by Guillermo Del Toro, whose monster mashes usually feel, if nothing else, extracted from both his brain and heart. Pacific Rim is an enjoyable riff on the giant-monster movies that inspired it, but it's an unlikely choice for anyone's favorite Del Toro movie. Technically, it was his biggest-ever hit, but it wasn't exactly a sensation. He hasn't returned to direct the sequel, only produce it, and original studio Warner Bros. happily traded its distribution rights over to Universal.

That leaves Pacific Rim: Uprising feeling like even more of a gamble than the original; it looks just as expensive, rife with impressive monster/robot effects, and digitally rendered destruction, but it answers a lot of questions that few fans were likely asking. In a way, this makes it a perfect companion piece to Pacific Rim. It's utterly inconsequential but committed to fully imagining its inconsequentiality.

The movie picks up a decade after the original, in a world that is still recovering both physically and mentally from the monster attacks. The early section follows Jake (John Boyega), the son of Idris Elba's heroic leader from the first film, bumming around a coastal area ravaged by the initial monster war and now something of a no-man's land, full of beastly skeletons and scavenged robot parts. It's not unlike recent sequels to Independence Day and Transformers in that it's willing to examine what the world looks like after the apocalyptic destruction of a typical blockbuster, but director Steve S. DeKnight is by turns less bombastic and less cornball than his old-guard competition.

Pacific Rim: Uprising also makes some gestures toward increased kid-friendliness — yes, more kid-friendly than the first movie that pit giant monsters against giant robots. Stylistically, the battles are brighter-lit and less moodily evocative than Del Toro's; DeKnight makes them look a bit more like a mega-budget Power Rangers episode, and his handling of suspense and action is similarly weightless. The movie also brings in a younger crew of soldiers who must enter a neural "drift" to pilot the robot-crafts, including scavenging orphan Amara (Cailee Spaeny).

It's neat that the movie presents a kickass girl as one of its heroes, but it feels a bit like a half-measure; in between check-ins with Amara and her vague mentor-mentee relationship with Jake, the movie goes off on missions with Jake and his frenemy Nate (Scott Eastwood, making it more apparent than ever that he's the son of Clint). As before, there's plenty of jargon-y world-building, and though this movie arrives only five years after its predecessor, it often plays like a legacy sequel to a beloved 20-year-old original that must serve both the new characters and the beloved returning faces.

The fact that this strategy is semi-nonsensical — Boyega and Spaeny are more fun than many of the original characters anyway, and to the extent that the "legacy" characters are served, they're often in some manner betrayed — doesn't really hurt Pacific Rim: Uprising. Its inessential, unrequested nature inures it against many of the usual sequel disappointments. If you liked Pacific Rim, you'll probably like Uprising, too. It might even leave a generation of kids wanting more.

But it's a sequel that makes the original seem more sequel-worthy than it probably is.

]]> Thu, 22 Mar 2018 05:40:00 -0400
<![CDATA[How Melissa McCarthy became one of Hollywood's biggest stars]]>

Where have all the movies stars gone? As has happened regularly for the past decade or so, a film-industry publication is alarmed over a perceived lack of A-listers. This time it's The Hollywood Reporter, asking: "If Jennifer Lawrence can't open a movie, who can?"

The answer is Melissa McCarthy.

It's not just that the comedian is a better actor than she gets credit for, playing dumb in Identity Thief, smart in Spy, earnest in Ghostbusters, and raucously offensive in The Boss. For star-assessing purposes, nothing matters as much as consistent ticket sales, and almost no one puts butts in the seats as reliably as she does.

This might come as a surprise to The Hollywood Reporter. In assessing the dwindling power of today's movie stars, it makes a common point: Intellectual property has taken over Hollywood, making audiences more interested in following franchises like Batman and Spider-Man and less interested in following actors. That's true to an extent, but what this complaint misses is that not every hit movie needs to make superhero-style money and very few movie stars, even big ones, have spotless track records.

McCarthy comes close though. Since breaking out from character-actor obscurity as part of the Bridesmaids ensemble in 2011, she has yet to appear in a movie that wasn't at least a moderate hit. Identity Thief, The Heat, and Spy were all very successful. Two smaller-scale comedies she made with her husband Ben Falcone, Tammy and The Boss, did far better than their mixed-to-negative reviews indicated they would, and St. Vincent (in which she had a strong supporting role) was an indie hit. The closest she's come to a financial miss was the 2016 Ghostbusters remake, which made money similar to her other hits, but cost a lot more to create, making it more of a studio accounting error than a movie audiences really rejected.

It makes a weird kind of sense that putting McCarthy in a brand-name remake would not be one of her biggest successes. As with most big stars, she is the brand; adding another brand feels redundant. A smaller movie like The Boss may not have made $300 million domestically, but presumably almost everyone who saw it did so because they wanted to see Melissa McCarthy in a movie. That is the precise definition of movie star.

Yet in the likely event that McCarthy's next movie (May's Life of the Party, another collaboration with Falcone) keeps the streak alive, she still may not get the credit she deserves. Consistently starring in money-making comedies doesn't seem to count as "real" star power, because it doesn't involve steering massive-budget vehicles across a variety of genres.

In reality, very few stars have actually accomplished this feat. As major a figure as Tom Cruise couldn't turn Eyes Wide Shut or Magnolia into smashes during his prime; he could only attract a larger audience than likely would have been interested without him. McCarthy seems to have the opposite quasi-limitation: She couldn't boost a Ghostbusters remake into phenomenon status because she hasn't built her audience on lavish budgets or spectacle. She can, however, bring crowds to movies of relatively little spectacle beyond her peerless facility with improvised insults, which may well serve as a relief when pitted against the all-season would-be blockbusters.

There have always been comic actors with box office pull, of course, but many of them expand their appeal by going effects-heavy and/or family-friendly; think of Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum or Will Ferrell in Elf. But McCarthy's non-Ghostbusters movies have flourished despite relatively modest productions, and often with an R rating. Indeed, part of her appeal seems rooted in her ability to keep her movies grounded, even if she's doing or saying something outlandish. The Heat may be a buddy action-comedy, but it emphasizes the "buddy" and "comedy" aspects a lot more than the action. Even the more elaborate caper Spy has a relatable hook involving her character feeling underappreciated at work.

In a world of movie superheroes, making hit comedies might seem like a niche skill. But McCarthy's record places her alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Dwayne Johnson, without as much support from A-list auteurs or brand-name ensembles. The ascendance of a new star may not be as lavish as it used to be, but ignoring McCarthy's consistency contributes to the mentality that only the biggest, noisiest movies matter. Stars are supposed to be their own brand names, their own special effects, and not particularly reliant on sequels. That's McCarthy all over.

Inevitably, something will break her hot streak. She might have to resign herself to a career akin to Will Ferrell's, remaining a draw while weathering a mix of hits and flops. Then again, maybe she'll just keep going and remain a clockwork performer, like Denzel Washington, attracting a crowd nine times out of 10 for nearly 20 years.

Movie stars are often known for making their skillsets look deceptively easy. Maybe McCarthy is too good at her job to get the recognition she deserves.

]]> Fri, 16 Mar 2018 06:00:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The Oscars' weirdest phenomenon]]>













]]> Wed, 28 Feb 2018 05:45:02 -0500
<![CDATA[Why isn't Rachel McAdams a superstar?]]>

Don't you miss Rachel McAdams?

When she first appears in the new comedy Game Night, sharing competitive banter and, shortly thereafter, makeout sessions with studio regular Jason Bateman, there is a palpable sense of reunion. Not between her and Bateman, mind, but between her and the moviegoing audience, who have seemed primed to embrace McAdams as a Julia Roberts-level megastar for about 15 years.

It's not as if McAdams has been in hiding. Her last two theatrically released movies were high-profile in that classic one-for-me, one-for-them way: She had a thankless sorta-love-interest part in the Marvel blockbuster Doctor Strange, and she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work in the Best Picture winner Spotlight. Though she kept a lower profile following her marathon of successes in 2004 and 2005 (during which she appeared in Mean Girls, The Notebook, Wedding Crashers, Red Eye, and The Family Stone, all hits, mostly well-liked, some beloved), her career has been consistently strong, logging mainstream hits like Sherlock Holmes and The Vow while also working with legendary directors like Terence Malick, Brian De Palma, Anton Corbijn, and Cameron Crowe.

Why, then, does McAdams not especially feel like one of our biggest movie stars?

She clearly has both dramatic and comedic chops; one reason Game Night works perhaps better than it should is that she seems to be having fun in it. Being Bateman's on-screen wife in a broad comedy can be as thankless a task as worrying about a Marvel hero as he charges into battle, but Game Night takes cues from the Neighbors films and, further back, classic screwball comedy, casting its husband and wife as an equal comic team. Bateman and McAdams play a couple who meet over an intense round of bar trivia, then team up to take every game, from Monopoly to Celebrity, very seriously. This is what keeps them from immediately realizing when their interactive murder-mystery party has turned into a very real life-or-death thriller.

Game Night is basically a comic version of the David Fincher movie The Game, and the Fincher homages don't stop there; there are little technical riffs on The Social Network, Panic Room, and Fight Club. The commitment to an actual cinematic style really sells the silliness, and McAdams is crucial to this success because she's the only member of the cast, save perhaps supporting players Kyle Chandler (playing Bateman's hotshot brother) or Jesse Plemons (playing an extremely buttoned-up cop), who would make sense in a real Fincher movie.

It's not that she plays the material straight — she unwittingly throws around a real gun like it's a prop, she quotes Pulp Fiction, she sings "Semi-Charmed Life" with gusto, and her character's struggles with gravitas are often hilarious. Rather, she has a star's way of making heightened, scripted behavior feel both grounded and charming, something that makes her adept at comedy, drama, and mixtures of the two. She should be in high demand.

And she probably is, comparatively speaking; at least some of her remove from the hottest, harshest spotlights is probably a personal choice. I wonder, though, if that choice has less to do with avoiding the pitfalls of fame (she's not exactly toiling in obscurity) and more to do with the movies that the big studios aren't making when they plow almost $200 million into something like Doctor Strange. Go back to that big McAdams run in 2004-2005, and look at the genres she skipped through: a teen comedy, a romantic drama, a raunchy buddy rom-com, a small-scale thriller, and a family dramedy. The movies that followed included a journalism thriller (State Of Play), a career-gal dramedy (Morning Glory), and two different time-traveling romantic dramas (The Time Traveler's Wife and About Time).

None of these genres and subgenres are exactly extinct, but they're all, to some degree, endangered due to the refocused priorities of big studios, which want franchisable, spin-off-able, big-money "intellectual property," and, during one brief window each year, maybe one or two movies that can win Oscars. Though her first big hit was a now-classic teen movie, McAdams has generally endeavored to make movies for an adult audience, often with some degree of perceived female appeal. In other words, an audience that big studios are convincing to stay home and watch Netflix instead of going out to their movies.

Not every McAdams vehicle has even been as good as Game Night, much less as good as Spotlight. But what holds her back from next-level superstardom doesn't seem like a lack of quality control or any reticence on her part so much as her daring to develop a star persona that involves superheroes only briefly and tangentially.

There are recurring elements of her films that obviously hold some kind of interest for her: Besides the aforementioned time-traveling romances, she's done several different movies about several different forms of journalism and several small-scale thrillers fraught with sexual tension, including her underrated late-period De Palma freakout Passion. None of these movies are ego trips, but in all of them, it actually matters who's playing the McAdams part. The reason McAdams works so comfortably in Game Night is the same reason she felt adrift in Doctor Strange: Her old-fashioned star power radiates opposite human co-stars, and feels dimmed — dispirited, even — when competing with enormous spectacle.

She's a human-scale star in a system that aspires for too big to fail.

]]> Fri, 23 Feb 2018 05:55:01 -0500
<![CDATA[Why January is secretly the best month for movies about ghosts]]>

This weekend, another sequel to the ghost story Insidious opens in several thousand theaters across North America. Mainstream horror fans — the audiences who flock to almost any wide-release horror movie and often boo at the end — should be used to this; a whole generation of them have grown up in a world where a horror movie opens on the first weekend of January almost every year. It's become a more reliable date for horror releases than even Halloween.

It hasn't always been this way. Before 2005, the first weekend in January was decidedly barren, with only a handful of new releases going back 20 years. The game-changer here appears to have been the long-forgotten Michael Keaton vehicle White Noise, a modest ghost-movie hit in a year when the Saw series was about to peak.

Though no one would applaud its quality, White Noise does feel accidentally influential when looking at a dozen years' worth of early-January horrors. Though a few traffic in slashers (Texas Chainsaw 3D, 2013), vampires (Underworld: Blood Wars, 2017; Daybreakers, 2010), or the occasional spectacle of Nicolas Cage fighting a medieval witch (Season of the Witch, 2011), the majority, like Insidious: The Last Key, are ghost stories. They may not be very good, but there's still something satisfying about ducking out of chilly January weather into a screening that offers different kinds of shivers and chills. The blue-black color palettes of so many horror movies even resemble a cold winter's day.

So what about Insidious: The Last Key?

By the measure of early-year ghost pictures, it's pretty good. The Insidious series in general, begun by Saw duo James Wan and Leigh Whannell, is consistently well-crafted — at least technically. Whannell, who still writes and co-stars in the films, might not think much of his audience, constantly pushing his characters to spout inelegant explanations like "you abandoned me to a real monster — our father." But director Adam Robitel does wring suspense from much of The Last Key, and the film's headliner, Lin Shaye, who plays paranormal communicator Elise, has a warmth and commitment to the material that some genre actors lack.

It's also refreshing to see a mainstream movie with a septuagenarian actress as the unambiguous lead character. This is still rare, and it might have been made possible by the release date. As cynical as it sounds, studios might feel more likely to experiment with early January releases, since all they care about is the fact that the movie is ready to go as soon as the holidays clear.

Given that leeway, maybe January horror movies should be more adventurous. Insidious: The Last Key is very much a sequel; it can't match the surprise of the original, and when it does deploy a substantially clever twist, the filmmakers practically toss off what would be, in other horror movies, a lynchpin moment. Still, it works well enough; despite being set before the first movie and deepening the series' continuity, it can stand alone as a few-frills ghost story with an interesting lead character, a few good scares, some creepy creature designs, and a time-tripping spirit dimension that gives the whole thing a low-tech haunted-house vibe.

This movie also might feel a little better than it is because, counterintuitively, it follows a deluge of genuine good stuff. December and January see countless award hopefuls and high-quality, end-of-year releases. It can be refreshing to settle in for a modest, low-budget horror movie in the middle of all that prestige.

January is often derided as a big-studio garbage dump, and sometimes it earns that assumption. But as some studios ignore entire genres in order to focus on planting gigantic tentpoles, trashy January horror movies have become something more than simple financially motivated programming. Intentionally or not, they're planting a flag for release-schedule diversity.

]]> Thu, 04 Jan 2018 05:40:01 -0500
<![CDATA[Is Phantom Thread funny?]]>

Are P.T. Anderson's movies funny?

As a critic who often sees movies at press screenings, I'm privy to experiences that I know are markedly different from other moviegoers. Sometimes this is a good thing, as when the press audience for The Accountant started guffawing at its late-game absurdities. Sometimes it's kind of a bummer, as when a crowdpleaser doesn't go over so well in a tiny screening room. And sometimes it's just different, as when Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread receives the kind of raucous (if occasional) laughter that it's difficult to picture manifesting in a commercial setting.

It's not that Phantom Thread, in which Anderson reteams with his There Will Be Blood star Daniel Day-Lewis for another story about a single-minded man, is laughably bad. But it's also not exactly a comedy. It's as wonderfully unclassifiable as most of Anderson's movies. There are some hints of gothic sorta-romance in sync with the kinds of movies made around, or slightly before, the movie's 1950s setting, as exacting fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis) takes up with a young waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). Each finds the other reluctant to bend to their respective wills, so there is some relationship-strife drama in the offing, too, which is approximately where the blackly comic notes grow louder.

Around the middle of the film, in what is one of its signature scenes, Woodcock's breakfast routine is disrupted by Alma. She's not an especially loud or uncouth woman, except compared to her fussy, controlling man, who bristles at the sound (amplified by Anderson's soundtrack) of her buttering and consuming toast. Reynolds fumes and eventually suggests that she quiet herself or leave. It could be a scene out of an English sitcom, or a more genteel studio comedy from years ago, and in those contexts it would seem lightly amusing at best. But in the middle of this tense, unusual romance, one where both parties initially seem braced for a swift dissolution, the real hostility behind Woodcock's irritation makes it funnier.

This is a more low-key version of what Anderson did in 2002's Punch-Drunk Love, another romance that seemed poised on the precipice of disaster. The relationship between an unstable man-child (Adam Sandler) and the gently offbeat woman he adores (Emily Watson) could be described as a romantic comedy; it could also be described as the most nerve-wracking romantic comedy ever made. Upon first viewing, it seems like something terrible could happen at any moment.

I recall Roger Ebert writing about reports of unsophisticated audience members breaking into laughter at disturbing scenes in Punch-Drunk Love. They were conditioned, he thought, by dopier Adam Sandler characters to find scenes of destruction amusing. But this is itself a simpler read of a movie that uses the rhythms of Sandler movies to offer startling discomfort, which itself can be funny. Anderson uses these moments to break tension, then immediately tense up further. So when Sandler's character responds to a stream of hectoring insults from his many sisters by smashing in a series of glass doors, it's disturbing but not unfunny — it's like a slapstick scene from a regular Sandler comedy plugged into an amp, squalling out some feedback at the end. Comedy is driven at least in part by surprise, which often comes from inappropriate behavior, and Punch-Drunk Love walks a line between inappropriate and frightening.

The same is true for Phantom Thread's Woodcock — and, in her way, Alma, whose way of regaining the upper hand in her relationship has a devious, darkly funny logic. (She foreshadows her strong will early on: "If you want to have a staring contest with me," she notes, "you'll lose.") Day-Lewis is not thought of as a comic performer, but sometimes the best way to get a laugh is to inhabit a character fully, and that, of course, is his specialty. His commitment is part of the explosive shock-laughs he gets at the notorious ending of There Will Be Blood, explaining oil-filching in terms of straws and milkshakes. Woodcock speaks more lightly than Daniel Plainview, with a slightly effete fussiness; again, this could turn lightly sitcommy, like a fashion-world Frasier. But the way the movie examines how control and raw need intertwine is very Anderson.

Among the filmmakers he came up with in the late '90s, Anderson isn't quite as pervasively serious as Darren Aronofsky or Christopher Nolan (and even those directors have their moments of levity). But unlike, say, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, or David O. Russell, he's never made a movie that could be called a comedy. Phantom Thread isn't his foray into the genre, but some of the film's fans have taken to Twitter to note how surprisingly funny it is — at least one early reaction called it his funniest work, which strikes me as a stretch, like a genuine laugh self-consciously amplified into a performative guffaw. Anderson's last movie before this one was Inherent Vice, which occasionally veered into genuine slapstick, and his breakthrough Boogie Nights has plenty of big laughs.

If anything, his mixture of intensity and comedy stays remarkably consistent, in tone if not in pure number of laughs. He's ultimately both sort of funny and probably incapable of making anything resembling a comedy. Punch-Drunk Love has elements of romantic comedy and Adam Sandler formula, and it's incredibly tense. The Master is elliptical and disturbing, but dotted with a few hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman outbursts. Boogie Nights is rollicking until it turns tragic. Inherent Vice is a sometimes-comic detective movie, but it's suffused with loss and regret. There Will Be Blood goes so "too far" that it's hard not to laugh in disbelief. And now Phantom Thread is a half-harrowing, half-tender chamber piece about the nature of love that also pokes, amusingly, at the supposed importance of the Great Artist.

It's a strange, remarkable piece of work, and a reminder that laughter doesn't have to derive from jokes. It can come from feats of audacity, too.

]]> Tue, 26 Dec 2017 05:40:02 -0500
<![CDATA[The Last Jedi finally gives Star Wars fauna its due]]>

Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been rightfully praised for blazing a new trail. The latest entry in the wildly popular series is surprising, stylized, and narratively ambitious in ways its more nostalgic predecessor, The Force Awakens, never was. But at least in one important aspect, The Last Jedi actually marks a return to the old ways of doing things. I speak, of course, of space creatures.

When live-action Star Wars came back to movie screens after a decade-long hibernation in 2015, it was clear that the filmmakers, including new director J.J. Abrams, wanted to re-prioritize the human characters. Humans populated George Lucas' controversial prequel trilogy, of course, but Lucas' seeming distance from actors and his fascination with new technology meant that their performances weren't always the most eye-catching element on screen. (Just think of The Phantom Menace's Jar Jar Binks.) So The Force Awakens, as if to reassure the audience that they were dealing with a director who actually liked actors, kept one of its biggest computer-generated-only characters, the shadowy villain Snoke, shrouded in fuzzy transmissions. Another computer-generated creation, the wily bar proprietor Maz, was clearly modeled on Yoda: diminutive, confidently mischievous, wise. It was the flesh-and-blood actors who really stood out.

This was not a bad strategy, as Abrams is a casting whiz who helped make new characters Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) unquestionable and surprising highlights in a movie that was sold in large part on nostalgia. That more nostalgic space is where the new Star Wars creatures were consigned. Even glimpses at strange new species during a roving look through Maz's outpost felt more like an homage to the first film's famous cantina scene than an introduction to memorable new side characters.

Writer-Director Rian Johnson's Last Jedi stays focused on the humans (and the previous film's non-human, non-alien sidekick, the droid BB-8). How could he not, with Ridley, Boyega, and Isaac supplying so much charisma and empathy? But he also nudges Star Wars back in the direction of its more creature-y comforts.

Pre-release hype fixated on the porgs, the tiny owl-y, penguin-ish birds that populate the remote island where Rey goes to find Luke Skywalker. But the island is also home to an amphibious race of female caretakers who look askance at Rey. Much later, the salty planet Crait introduces a pack of crystalline dog/wolf creatures called vulptices. In between, a stop at a casino on the planet Canto Bight provides the requisite alien overload, where any number of creatures bustle through the frame.

None of these creatures are major characters in the movie. Some of the casino patrons will doubtless be assigned names later for toy and/or trivia purposes (and I can't wait to find out the official ridiculous moniker of the tiny alien who wears a monocle and hoards gold coins), but many of Last Jedi's most memorable creatures are patterned after animals rather than speaking, upright-walking humans: the porgs, the vulptices, and the fathiers, a horse-like species used for racing and gambling on Canto Bight and, as such, subjected to much cruelty.

This might seem like a further segregation of the charismatic humans from the alien backgrounds. But Johnson does something canny with the movie's zoological creations. He uses them not just to give his world detail and texture (this was something Lucas excelled at, even in the much-maligned prequels), but to suggest a world beyond the ongoing Resistance-versus-First-Order conflict. At one point during Rey's training with Luke, he tries to better define the Force, emphasizing that it's not a power that resides within certain chosen people, but rather something that connects every living thing. The Last Jedi is fascinatingly ambivalent about the nature of the seemingly eternal wars that lend the series its name, and showing the natural beauty of these worlds subtly reorients the movie's point of view. (The Phantom Menace did this, too, but a lot of people were too distracted by Jar Jar to notice).

This also seems to be the function of Johnson's humanoid aliens. The patrons of Canto Bight may look like a collection of imitation-cantina denizens, but it's crucial that they're described as, essentially, members of the 1 percent — and war profiteers, with connections to both warring parties. While previous eclectic locations like Tatooine show the seedier underbelly of the galaxy, Johnson offers a glimpse at the upscale version of citizens whose lives may be affected by de facto civil war, but go right ahead amidst it, tending to their own concerns.

The new Star Wars movies are still either too confident in their humans or too cautious about resembling the prequels to go all-in on a fully CG (or puppet) non-droid character (the villainous Snoke is once again one of the most prominent effects characters in the new movie, and his design has been tweaked to look creepier, which actually involves making him look more human). The biggest new characters are all human, and some established non-human favorites have more cameo-like roles.

Yet even without a Jabba the Hutt, a Watto, or a Jar Jar, the filmmakers seem to better understand how important these characters are. The Resistance and First Order are ultimately good and evil, respectively. But Johnson uses a hallmark of the series to suggest a galaxy's worth of life in between.

]]> Mon, 18 Dec 2017 05:55:02 -0500
<![CDATA[Guillermo del Toro is not profound]]>

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is unmistakably a fable. It takes place in a stylized, green-tinted version of the Cold War past; its internal logic is vaguely dreamlike rather than strictly realistic; and, perhaps most important, it's a beauty-and-the-beast love story between a shy woman and a majestic humanoid sea creature. But like most of del Toro's films, Water is hardly intended for the typical fairy-tale audience. It's rated R, and even before it indulges in some gruesome violence, it shows the heroine masturbating as part of her daily routine.

That Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is allowed to express sexuality in the movie sets it apart from so many homage-heavy, movie-drunk tributes to monsters and Old Hollywood. Del Toro clearly has designs on an adult sensibility; his previous picture, Crimson Peak, was also rated R, as was his acclaimed kid-starring fantasy Pan's Labyrinth and his comic-book franchise entry Blade II. He's made movies appropriate for 13-year-olds (see the robots-versus-monsters epic Pacific Rim), but unlike so many Hollywood fantasists, he doesn't chase that demographic. He's chasing his muse, and trying to infuse it with the poetry he sees in his influences.

Yet there's still something unsophisticated about The Shape of Water — a limitation that's faintly visible in some of del Toro's past movies but more glaring when he tries to make his monsters meaningful. It goes beyond the screenplay's oddball contrivances, like the way mute-from-birth Elisa works a second shift at a shadowy government facility where she's allowed to scrub floors in a top-secret lab more or less unsupervised, or the way scientists and spooks dither over the fate of the amphibious man (Doug Jones) long enough to give Elisa a chance to plan his escape. These details, as mentioned, can be chalked up to a low-key dream logic, though they lack the wit of, say, Tim Burton at his best.

Where The Shape of Water falls shortest is in the unconvincing adult relationship between woman and amphibi-man. Elisa's initial bond with the creature — feeding him hard-boiled eggs, showing him what music is — more closely resembles a parent-child tutelage, and much of it is delivered in montage featuring, well, more egg-eating and music-playing. The movie is full of swoony romantic images. It's odd, then, that many of the best ones don't involve the creature himself but rather Elisa's quiet fascination with older musicals (she practices tap dancing down the greenish halls of her apartment building). Her two interests — lush musicals and her creature pal — intersect for a fantasy sequence, but as gorgeous as it is, it never takes on weight greater than a whimsical daydream.

Hawkins and Jones both give expressive physical performances, but del Toro simply doesn't give them much to express below those physical surfaces. Elisa is meant to recognize the loneliness of this poor creature as similar to herself: "I move my mouth, like him," she signs to her friend Giles (Richard Jenkins). "I make no sound, like him." She further explains that the creature accepts her, and doesn't think of her as "incomplete" without her voice. But del Toro isn't particularly skilled at conveying Elisa's supposed loneliness; she's close with Giles, and with her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and both of them understand her perfectly. She's "lonely" because the movie needs her to be lonely.

Del Toro's reconception of a Black Lagoon-like creature as a romantic hero is an irresistible notion. But it's so much more concept than it is actual romance; as with the escape plan, Elisa (which is to say Hawkins) does most of the work. There are some nicely gruesome moments where del Toro pokes at the romanticizing of what is, after all, an untamed creature, no matter how advanced. Later, he subjects some of that danger to supernatural cop-outs, and his sense of irony, conveyed through hamfisted depictions of bigotry, is thin. Why, could it be that the "monster" the opening narration refers to may not actually be the amphibian man, but the cruel, racist security agent Strickland (Michael Shannon, creeping everyone out with his usual vim and vigor)?

The Shape of Water is beautifully crafted on a technical level, just like del Toro's other films, but it's no more communicative than Pacific Rim. And like Crimson Peak, it renders the idea of romantic melodrama oddly abstract. If another filmmaker, earlier in his career, made something so gorgeous, idiosyncratic, and emotionally inert, I might say he was just struggling to translate the soul of his obsessions to the screen. At this point, though, it seems like Shape is exactly what del Toro had in his head.

Maybe, most of the time, he's not struggling to dive below the surface. Maybe this is as much depth as he can plumb.

]]> Fri, 01 Dec 2017 05:35:02 -0500
<![CDATA[What the hell is Mel Gibson doing in Daddy's Home 2?]]>










]]> Fri, 10 Nov 2017 05:45:02 -0500
<![CDATA[Thor: Ragnarok is not a normal Marvel movie]]>

No film series can get as successful as the Marvel Cinematic Universe without eliciting its share of grumbles in the face of consistently enormous box office and consistently strong reviews. Now that Marvel is pumping out two or three of its own interconnected superhero movies each year, there's an established narrative that the studio relies on formulas that flatten out the input of individual filmmakers in service of the larger Marvel project.

It's a charge both unfair, in the sense that movies do not have to be idiosyncratic expressions of their makers' sensibilities to be entertaining, and accurate, in the sense that hardly any experienced director has made their most stylish or distinctive movie for Marvel. But some filmmakers have been more adept at navigating this post-millennial version of the studio system than others. It doesn't look easy: Even Joss Whedon, who had huge success with the first two Avengers films and to a large extent helped crystallize the Marvel house style, was seemingly worn out by clashing with the Marvel brass on Age of Ultron. On the next two Avengers pictures, he's out, and the less distinctive voices of Joe and Anthony Russo are in.

With this week's Thor: Ragnarok, New Zealand's Taiki Waititi issues a challenge to whatever internal style guidelines may be in place at Marvel (no one has seen them, but they often involve plentiful colors muted by digital cinematography, jokes at perfectly timed intervals, and lots of airships). His recent work includes the vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows and the small-scale comic adventure Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Starting small isn't unusual for a Marvel director; the Russos' pre-Marvel experience was in sitcoms and a forgotten Owen Wilson comedy. But Waititi seems especially unconcerned with continuity management, brand protection, or getting hired for an even-bigger blockbuster.

His resulting film is easily the best of the three Thor movies, and one of the best Marvel movies, period.

Previously the Thor series has operated under sometimes-unflattering extremes of the Marvel creative process. The first film features the unmistakable stamp of director Kenneth Branagh, with its canted angles and quasi-Shakespearean drama, bumping up against delightful fish-out-of-water comedy and less delightful, sometimes clumsy nods to the developing Marvel Universe. The second film, The Dark World, carries the unmistakable stamp of a producer-driven franchise hiring a TV pro to just get the job done, already — and because Marvel has relatively high quality control, the job does get done, especially in the movie's inventive final stretch.

Waititi's crack at Thor sounds like more of the same on paper. Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the god of thunder, sees his planet/realm of Asgard apocalyptically threatened by his long-lost older sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), the goddess of death; their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) is ultimately unable to help; his adopted brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) offers to help but also schemes to advance himself; his fellow Avenger the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) turns up for some Marvel Cinematic Universe synergy and comic relief, as does Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in a smaller role.

Much of Ragnarok takes place away from Asgard, on Sakaar, a dump planet presided over by the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), who imprisons Thor and pits him against the Hulk in a gladiatorial match (Bruce Banner, the Hulk's human alter ego, hasn't been seen in a while). Thor must corral Hulk/Banner, Loki, and fellow Asgardian expat Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) to escape Sakaar and return to fight off his Asgard-conquering sister.

This is all less formulaic than it sounds. Some Marvel movies defy genre by honoring Marvel formula above all others; Waititi mixes his genres more organically, with Sakaar resembling locations out of Star Wars or Mad Max while some of his wide-shot compositions (like Thor barely out-flying an angry fire-demon) and Mark Mothersbaugh's gloriously synth-driven score recall '80s fantasy epics. He also recasts Hemsworth's Thor as an overconfident goofball flummoxed whenever he can't hammer his way out of a sticky situation, forced to constantly negotiate buddy-comedy dynamics with less predictable allies.

While previous Thor movies aspired to a certain royal-family grandeur in the Thor/Loki rivalry, Waititi reimagines Thor's clashes with just about everyone in more comedic terms. But while the movie is heavier on jokes than almost any Marvel entry (and funnier than the similarly Mos-Eisley-as-farce Guardians of the Galaxy), it's often funny because of the humanity underneath, taking advantage of character histories and Marvel tropes rather than relying on them. When Thor and the Hulk are at odds, they're both throwing tantrums, trying to conceal their hurt feelings but revealing more of their wounded immaturity than ever. Valkyrie is a jaded badass not unlike Gamora from Guardians, but beyond Thompson's fine performance, the filmmakers ground her with unspoken details like her dingy mess of an apartment.

Some limitations still persist. Cate Blanchett's Hela chews some clearly delicious scenery, but she spends a lot of her time off in a second, less compelling movie than the one where Thor, Hulk, Loki, and Valkyrie bumble their way through a bizarre garbage-strewn dystopia. The movie's 130-minute running time takes a while to rev up (though to be fair, some of Waititi's smaller movies have moments of aimlessness that make them feel longer than they are). The Doctor Strange cameo, padding that running time, is both fun and a time-waster, and winds up a wash.

But the studio has gotten better at integrating this kind of extra material into its films — to a fault, even. Earlier Marvel projects have passages that feel like the post-credits bonus scenes shoving their way into the middle of the movie. In later films, the universe-connecting business proceeds so smoothly that it's the smaller, less comics-reliant moments that jut out from the Marvel machinery. When Waititi frames distinctive shots that don't depend on spectacle, like a conversation that alternates Thor and Banner in one straight-ahead frame and Valkyrie in another, it's so striking that, like a tantalizing cameo aimed at superfans, it creates a kind of hunger: More! More moments like that!

Ragnarok has about as many moments like that as seems possible within the Marvel framework, which is to say somewhat more than Spider-Man: Homecoming (which had a lot) and vastly more than recent Marvel part-ones like Ant-Man or Doctor Strange (both of which took more of a step-forward, step-back approach). Even the ebb and flow of personal style within the Marvel universe is, if not predictable, subject to certain patterns. It's striking to see that their trilogies about Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor can all be divided similarly: Each has an introductory chapter that feels distinct from its cousins; an installment where the requirements of Universe Service are particularly visible (Iron Man 2; Captain America: Civil War; Thor: The Dark World); and an installment that builds upon the established characters in effective and satisfying ways (Iron Man 3; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Ragnarok).

So it's not that the Marvel movies lack a sensibility so much as they place their emphasis on their characters' and brand's sensibility moreso than a filmmaker's specific point of view. As mentioned, that doesn't make their movies bad, and it still leaves plenty of space for directors willing to play the game. Thor: Ragnarok feels like a Taika Waititi movie, and a very good one — in part because however briefly, it takes the god of thunder off the perpetual-motion machine of success.

]]> Thu, 02 Nov 2017 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Happy Death Day is yet another riff on Groundhog Day. How did this happen?]]>

Stop me if you've heard this before, possibly in the exact same way you heard it yesterday: Happy Death Day, opening Friday, is a riff on Groundhog Day, the classic Bill Murray comedy about an arrogant weather man who lives Feb. 2 over and over until he gets it right.

It may sound familiar even if you're not stuck in your own time loop because this year saw the release of Before I Fall, in which a teenage girl (Zoey Deutch) keeps reliving a day that ends in a tragic car crash; the Netflix debut of Naked, in which a feckless man (Marlon Wayans) keeps waking up naked in an elevator on the morning of his wedding; and the Broadway birth of Groundhog Day, the musical, in which, well, you know. Happy Death Day is the slasher-movie version: A disdainful sorority girl (Jessica Rothe) keeps getting stabbed to death by a masked attacker on her birthday, resetting with every death. She uses this time-loop as an opportunity to track down her killer.

From a creative standpoint, it's easy to see why this structure has been repeated: The conceptual heavy-lifting has already been done by another movie, but there's still room for individual invention. Of course, Groundhog Day didn't invent the idea of getting stuck in a time-loop, but it's the clear reference point for most of the time-loop movies that have followed — especially in its conceit that reliving the same day over and over should become a vehicle for self-improvement. That's true of the best Groundhog Day successor Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise gradually sheds his glib cowardice and becomes a super-soldier as he re-lives a battle with marauding aliens.

Before I Fall and Happy Death Day are notable for refocusing this self-improvement plan on young women. (The most negligible entry of the year, Netflix's Naked, has both the clumsiest employment of the gimmick and the flimsiest thematic backbone; it's about a guy who needs to, like, try a little harder.) Fall's heroine is a popular girl complicit in her friends' bullying behavior, while Happy Death Day's Tree is, if not the meanest girl in her sorority, perhaps abdicating the title due to lack of effort. She brushes off her roommate, rolls her eyes at a guy who helped her out after a night of heavy drinking, and ignores phone calls from her dad.

In a normal slasher picture, Tree would be maybe the second or third victim — the bitchy friend or frenemy whose death brings ghoulish satisfaction. One of the most fun aspects of Happy Death Day (and it is a lot of fun) is the way it toys with genre conventions, turning a knife-fodder caricature into a winning Final Girl with emotional depth. It also plays around with slasher movie routines; most of its different "kills" are variations on the same timeline.

But as with Before I Fall, the engine of the story is how this girl can learn to be a better person if she's just forced to live the same day over and over — treating the supporting characters and extras in her life, introduced in that first 15-minute run-through of the day, with more empathy or respect. Before I Fall turns this effort into belabored melodrama, but at least it's a self-improvement directive written and directed by women; there's something faintly condescending about the men who wrote and directed Happy Death Day putting Tree in her place, implying that her list of murder suspects is relatively long because of how she treats people (murder hardly seems like the right comeuppance for withering eyerolls). But the movie rights itself through a late sequence that makes Tree's application of her life lessons — her attempts at kindness — seem both utterly half-assed and charmingly energetic.

Happy Death Day also features the best 2017 wrinkle to the time-loop formula: Tree starts sustaining some injuries from one day to the next. She wakes up looking the same, but grows weaker and accumulates scar tissue — the process takes a toll on her. It's a physicalization of the psychological torture usually associated with getting stuck on a repeating day. Getting the day right is hard work.

Time-loop movies convert that hard work into sharply edited gag reels; like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day launches into a funny trial-and-error montage once its heroine thinks she understands the game at hand. (This is something lacking from Before I Fall, which treats its repeated days more methodically, in keeping with its more serious — borderline leaden — tone.) Though time-loops involve a surrender of control, these newer versions are fantasies of focus, inviting us to imagine a world where one specific task demands our attention. This is the biggest departure from Groundhog Day, where Murray's character must arrive at his own conclusions about what to do with his looped time (the catastrophe he's preventing is just his everyday life). Before I Fall, Happy Death Day, and even the wan Naked have problems that must be addressed, and going off on side adventures, attractive as the prospect may be, won't solve anything.

This may be the current appeal of the time-loop structure: In a world where bad news cascades through our various screens and seems to compound every week, there's something comforting (to the audience, if not the character) about the notion of not moving forward until this one damn problem gets definitively solved. The young women of Before I Fall and Happy Death Day have social media, real-life friends, and plenty of privilege, but none of it can help them. Instead, they have infinite chances and no shortcuts. Of course, a 100-minute movie is a shortcut, too — capable of transforming work into something like escapism.

]]> Fri, 13 Oct 2017 06:00:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Ben Stiller's never-ending midlife crisis]]>

Ben Stiller has been having a midlife crisis in theaters for the better part of a decade. As the Meet the Parents and Night at the Museum series wound down and he approached 50, Stiller started regularly making movies about middle-aged guys dissatisfied with their lives, especially their perceived lack of success: Greenberg (2010) and While We're Young (2014) for Noah Baumbach (with a third Baumbach film hitting Netflix in October); his self-directed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013); and now Brad's Status, which is hitting select theaters this weekend.

Status makes central one particular aspect of Stiller's other recent midlife crisis movies. Brad, Stiller's character, is not especially successful, while most of his friends from college have gone on to great fame and/or fortune. Despite some nods toward Instagram envy, the title isn't a social-media pun. Brad's standing in life as the founder of a marginal nonprofit, the husband of the idealistic Melanie (Jenna Fischer), and a middle-class resident of Sacramento, California, feels minute compared to, say, his old buddy Craig (Michael Sheen), a former White House adviser now given ample airtime as an author and pundit. A bright spot glimmers in the form of Troy (Austin Abrams), Brad and Melanie's son. Brad and Troy are on a trip to see East Coast colleges when Brad learns his kid actually has a decent shot at getting into Harvard.

This sounds like the set-up for a dad comedy, wherein a well-meaning but overbearing father jumps through absurd hoops to help his kid get into a prestigious school and live vicariously through him. But writer-director Mike White clearly understands the emotional complexities of middle-aged neuroses; even Brad's pride in his son's success is elaborately second-guessed and broken down as soon as he feels it.

As such, a lot of the movie consists of voiceover and cutaways, either Brad's imaginings or just illustration of the people he talks about, but don't say much for themselves (characters played by Luke Wilson, Jemaine Clement, and White himself interact with Stiller only briefly, if at all). A central repeated image of the film is Brad in bed, tossing and turning, unable to silence his thoughts and just sleep. The sheer volume of this tossing and turning, physical and verbal, can be suffocating, and even if the movie is aware of Brad's absurdity ("maybe her contentment undermined my ambition," he privately considers uncharitably of his wife), it's still a lot to ask to spend so much time in his head.

To some degree, White balances the movie by keeping its action at a medium cringe, rather than going for a full-on opus of embarrassment. Brad's relationship with Troy feels real — Abrams is wonderfully unaffected — and grounds his mood swings. Those mood swings, from panic to hope to impatience to love, are what White captures so well here, keeping his quiet, well-observed movie from becoming a poor man's Greenberg.

Even so, this is Stiller's fourth midlife crisis movie since 2010. His seeming fascination with the horrors of mediocrity might seem odd for a guy who has had so much success, and tedious as a sign of his continuing interest in the worries of middle-aged white guys. But Brad's Status does call out Brad's white privilege. Like most of Stiller's midlife crisis movies, this one calls attention to, and pokes fun at, his character's weakness for self-obsessed worrying.

The 2017 edition represents a mellowed progression from, say, that scene in Meet the Parents where Stiller blows up at a maddening flight attendant. One of the most gratifying things about Brad's Status is its willingness to end without providing a clear-cut lesson. It may portend several more movies where Ben Stiller grapples with feelings of inadequacy to varying levels of interest, but the lack of resolution feels honest, for the character and for the actor.

Stiller might be stuck in a midlife crisis on screen, but he deepens that crisis like a pro.

]]> Fri, 15 Sep 2017 05:45:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The juvenile perspective of It]]>

Thirty years after Stephen King's It was first published, the novel has finally become a feature film. And in the process, It has gotten quite a bit younger.

Stephen King's behemoth of a book is a horror story, but it's also about the bonds formed in childhood between seven outcast children who call themselves the Losers Club. The novel toggles back and forth between the Losers as blood-bonded 11-year-olds and as scattered adults approaching 40. But the new and much-anticipated movie adaptation, succumbing to both the novel's intricate but cinematically unwieldy level of detail and a movie studio's desire for franchising, only features the kids. There's fun in the way the movie gets its young friends together faster than the hundreds of pages it takes in the book. But this approach also takes a toll on the horror.

After an unsettling prologue, taken almost exactly from the novel, in which Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) loses his little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) to a monstrous clown peeking out of a sewer during a rainstorm, the movie wastes no time in introducing Bill's buddies Richie (Finn Wolfhard from Netflix's Stranger Things), Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), and Stan (Wyatt Oleff), and having them intersect with new kid Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), tough girl Beverly (Sophia Lillis), and farm boy Mike (Chosen Jacobs). Eventually, they realize they've all had encounters with the shapeshifting monster that took Georgie and band together to try and fight it.

That's a simplification of the plot — but it's a simplification the movie makes too, by necessity. Without the adult half of the story, the film version of It becomes a riff on a type of narrative the book helped to popularize: the coming-of-age suburban adventure. This kind of story is closely associated with Steven Spielberg because of E.T., but that's really Spielberg's only crack at that material. He produced the far inferior The Goonies, but a different Steve had just as strong a hand in this sub-sub-genre: It was first published just weeks after the release of Stand By Me, itself the movie version of King's novel The Body and one that utilizes a similar framework of retro bonding, minus the more overt horrors.

The movie It also pushes the action forward, acknowledging that the distance between the book's 1958 and the movie's mid-'80s is roughly the same as today and the book's original present. So now Bill and his friends are riding bikes around a small Maine city in 1989 — and the sequel will presumably be set in 2017 or so. This half-clever, half-inevitable switch does more to drive home the passage of time than anything the bifurcated story can do in this form.

As far as decades-later invocations of this era go, the Losers Club group dynamic is funnier and less of a pastiche than the Stranger Things kids — if not quite as hilarious and endearing as the Super 8 kids. But when director Andrés Muschietti sends his camera drifting through the halls of their high school on the last day of school, catching the boys chattering with excitement, Beverly facing off against mean girls, and Ben fumbling through an exchange of pleasantries with Beverly, It crackles — moreso, it turns out, than during Muschietti's spooky set pieces.

Both the horror bits and the human story use a similar technique, but it pays off differently. The rush into adolescent friendship creates instant camaraderie, inviting the audience into the Losers Club, while the suspense sequences often feel impatient in their desire to cut to the chase or, if you will, to the scary clown. Visualizing King's sense of dread rotting a town from the inside is no easy task, but it's still disappointing to see Muschietti, who did such a masterful job on the horror movie Mama, turn the whole thing into an expanded haunted house. Even the cinematography feels more expressive in the scenes with less clown-clamor.

This It is creepy, sure, especially for people who don't watch a lot of horror movies. But those who do will recognize a lot of the same tricks and signifiers: creaking floorboards, filthy hair, clown dolls, the supernatural antagonist moving with stuttery jolts. The Conjuring famously received an R rating not for any gore or extreme violence, but just for being really scary. It is the opposite: It has an R because it's bloody, not because it's terrifying.

What keeps the movie running is those kids, particularly the mouthy Richie, who Wolfhard makes funnier than King's version; Ben, played with puppy-dog soulfulness by Jeremy Ray Taylor; and Beverly, who Lillis gives a pluck not always fully present on the page. Mike, who makes a later entrance to the book, isn't so lucky; his character suffers the most by delaying the adult stuff into a wholly separate film.

Put together, the focus on the kids both redeems It through charm and robs the movie of a greater power. Unlike in the book, the scares don't have much weight — they say BOO! and they dissipate. The gimcrack spookhouse atmosphere morphs It from a sprawling text about adolescent and preadolescent (and adult) anxieties into a self-conscious riff on familiar iconography — a likably runty little brother to Stand By Me, instead of an expansion on that story's bittersweet ideas. It shunts its dread off to the closing title card, teasing a sequel that might get really scary.

]]> Fri, 08 Sep 2017 05:50:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Logan Lucky reminds us why we love heist movies]]>

There's a moment early in Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky when Jimmy Logan, played by Channing Tatum, is called into his boss's office after a long day operating construction machinery fixing up the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. The boss, in his best casual-yet-firm voice, asks Jimmy to shut the door behind him.

As Tatum does this, the slightest trace of a disappointed realization — an acknowledgment that he knows, as the audience does, what's about to happen — crosses his face. He's about to be let go, and sure enough, that's what happens. It's a stock situation. But not, somehow, a stock moment. Tatum so perfectly conveys his sudden dread, and the movie so steadfastly refuses to milk the aftermath of the act, that the predictability of shut the door/have a seat suddenly feels attentive, even, in its sad little way, alive.

That's Soderbergh's heist movie — and Soderbergh's approach to familiar movie genres — in a nutshell. Logan Lucky has a lot of recognizable ingredients, stuff that could even be broadly classified as clichés, but Soderbergh and his cast re-enliven them, sometimes by simply refusing to explain them to the audience.

Some of this involves toying with the mechanics of a heist movie. Jimmy, in a tight spot financially with an old football injury, no job, and an ex-wife (Katie Holmes) intent on moving their daughter (Farrah Mackenzie) out of state, reveals early on that he plans to rob his former employer. The full extent how Jimmy, his one-armed war-vet brother Clyde (Adam Driver), their speed-demon sister Mellie (Riley Keough), and local (incarcerated) explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) will accomplish this is revealed only gradually, as the robbery is planned and, eventually, executed. Even then, a few key details take longer to emerge.

Doubling back narratives and sly twists are standbys of both heist movies and Soderbergh in entertainment mode. These two things previously converged in his all-star Ocean's trilogy, which manage to be both slick, crowdpleasing entertainment and deeply Soderberghian. Logan Lucky is almost more so on both counts. The characters are irresistible (and, unlike the Ocean's gang, not already well-off professionals) and the filmmaking is exacting — every pan, pivot, and cut is accounted for, yet stylish. Even the spontaneous-seeming moments move like clockwork.

But while the Ocean's movies teased out the eccentricity beneath their starry gloss, Soderbergh does something even bolder during certain passages of Logan Lucky: He avails himself to narrative clichés and dares to make them work again. The script, by mysterious newcomer Rebecca Blunt, is crisp and well-constructed, but plenty of its grace notes could have felt hoary, especially Jimmy's relationship with his young daughter. Doing it for the kids is nearly as creaky as going after "one last score," and giving Jimmy this motivation could easily unleash a torrent of sap.

Instead, Soderbergh has Tatum and Mackenzie underplay their scenes together, never goosing the drama. Jimmy's daughter is on the kid-pageant circuit, and rather than playing this for easy laughs, the movie regards her hobby with a kind of mild amusement. Jimmy obviously has some misgivings about pageants, as well as certain trappings of the modern world (he doesn't have a smartphone), but he never really lectures his kid, or the audience. The father and daughter just talk, with an affection and playfulness that leads, in the movie's final section, to a moment I found disarmingly moving — perhaps more so than anything else in Soderbergh's considerable filmography.

Yet Logan Lucky, like many of the director's best films, is a lot of fun, too. Soderbergh took a four-year break from directing movies that he called a retirement, and he's picked back up with the kind of genre exercise he was performing regularly before the break. Haywire was both a pulpy action movie and, with its casting of MMA fighter Gina Carano in the lead, an observation of a real athlete in graceful, brutal motion. Magic Mike found room for both the joy of male-stripper performance and the economic despair that fuels that lifestyle, rolled into a sort-of musical (when Matthew McConaughey takes the stage late in the movie, it's a move that's both wildly crowdpleasing and crazy desperate). In keeping with that pattern, Logan Lucky is a heist movie that reminds us why we like heist movies — why the off-kilter details of an elaborate robbery can feel so damn satisfying.

The unexpected common denominator between these three recent high-water marks is Channing Tatum, who Soderbergh has adopted as both a student and a muse, much like his work with George Clooney and Matt Damon. Even in his casting, Soderbergh takes something familiar — the hunky, humble leading man — and lends it offhand gravitas (he's since proved himself, but in his early roles Tatum felt a lot like a simulation of a movie star). The filmmaker who famously got Clooney to curb his head-nodding habit here keeps his actors from overplaying their hand, even when they're seeking sympathy or performing broad comic relief. That extends to the movie's economic-revenge angle, too, which manages to evoke the frustrations and aspirations of blue-collar work rather than pure white disgruntlement.

Even more than other auteurs in the one-for-them/one-for-me era, Soderbergh has made a surprising number of hits chased by a substantial number of flops and obscurities. He's made great movies in both categories, but with Logan Lucky, Soderbergh the studio-movie entertainer and Soderbergh the clinical, experimental stylist fully merge. As with Haywire and Magic Mike, and arguably much more crowdpleasing, he's made a movie more precision-tooled than its old-school counterparts yet still steeped in the pleasures of genre. He's back doing some of the best work of his career making old stuff look shiny and new.

]]> Wed, 16 Aug 2017 05:45:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Ingrid Goes West is the anti-internet movie we needed]]>


But it may not be described that way.









]]> Thu, 10 Aug 2017 10:22:39 -0400
<![CDATA[How SNL-alum comedies went from blockbusters to indie darlings]]>

There hasn't been a movie based directly on a Saturday Night Live sketch since 2010's cultishly adored but drastically underattended MacGruber, and while SNL cast members still pop up in movies, they generally seem less eager for star vehicles. It's not unusual for a breakout star like, say, Kate McKinnon to do at least half a dozen seasons on the show (her seventh begins in the fall) while logging scene-stealing supporting parts in movies like Ghostbusters and Rough Night. McKinnon is arguably the show's most popular performer at the moment, and she has yet to take an unequivocal starring role in a movie.

The premature and/or ill-considered SNL cast member vehicle, like Dana Carvey's Clean Slate or Chris Kattan's Corky Romano, may not be completely dead, but it's certainly less common than it used to be. Which is not to say relatively recent Saturday Night Live alums aren't taking leads.

In fact, July saw two such performers in leading roles: Landline stars one-season cast member Jenny Slate in a reunion with her Obvious Child director Gillian Robespierre, while Brigsby Bear is a showcase for current cast member Kyle Mooney (expected to return for his fifth season in the fall). Neither of them will necessarily play the average mall multiplex. In fact, they both premiered at Sundance back in January.

If Obvious Child felt a little like Slate shaking off her SNL run to depict a scrappier, grittier side of the New York comedy scene (she played a stand-up comedian in want of an abortion after a one-night stand), Landline ensconces her in a different kind of New York establishment. In a lot of ways, it resembles a Woody Allen-ish indie comedy from the mid-'90s, when the movie happens to be set. Specifically, it resembles Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers, in which a family heads out to follow its patriarch, suspecting him of adultery. Here Dana (Slate) and her teenage sister Ali (Abby Quinn) spy on their dad (John Turturro), who may be cheating on their mom (Edie Falco).

There are a couple of sorta-twists on this premise, more Woody Allen than M. Night Shyamalan: One, interesting in theory but not necessarily in practice, is that Dana herself begins cheating on her slightly dull fiancé with a guy the movie doesn't fully acknowledge is equally dull, but more conventionally handsome. Another, more productive development is that Dana and Ali forge a stronger bond as they fume and fret over their dad's, and Dana's, transgressions. When Robespierre stays focused on the two sisters and their distinct but familiar ways of nagging at each other — “you are such an irritant!” Dana complains, sounding almost awed — Landline has the sharp focus of her debut. The other characters, though well-sketched, don't really take root in the same way.

Little of Slate's performance here has to do with her broader comedy experience. She's clearly interested in playing women who are conscious of their past and current screw-ups, something that never had a chance to emerge during her brief time on Saturday Night Live. She has a clear and compelling voice as a performer, and it often seems to have almost nothing to do with her stint on the country's most famous sketch show.

Brigsby Bear, by contrast, feels very much of a piece with Mooney's SNL work, which is often as strange as it is melancholy. A co-writer of the script, Mooney plays James, a young-but-not-that-young man who still lives with his parents. He is first seen participating in a series of odd rituals, some involving a crudely produced children's television show called Brigsby Bear. Eventually, police burst through the door, because it turns out that James was kidnapped as a baby by cultists (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams) and raised as their own. His beloved Brigsby Bear is a lie, too, produced by his non-father for years, aimed directly at an audience of exactly one. As he adjusts to life with his actual parents, James decides that he'd like some closure on Brigsby by making a movie about him. Not a documentary, mind you, but a feature that concludes the character's bizarre science-fiction adventures.

Mooney is obsessed with bending the creakiest of entertainment conventions to a breaking point. On SNL, this manifests in characters like Bruce Chandling, a hacky stand-up comic whose material would have seemed stale 20 years ago, and who after issuing a bunch of stereotype-dependent yuks, always winds up staring into the abyss of his own loneliness. He also, with his frequent writing and scene partner Beck Bennett, riffs on the mechanics of television, as in a recent video that draws out the most minor of conflicts into a reality-show spat complete with confessional cutaways that say nothing.

Brigsby Bear performers a gentler, more delicate version of this cultural examination. The show-within-the-movie has an analog-age combination of clumsiness and tactility; the Brigsby Bear costume resembles, by turns, Teddy Ruxpin, Chuck E. Cheese animatronics, and Disney World characters. Though the scripts are driven by the bizarre mini-cult that spawned them, they aren't so much stranger than any number of kid-show relics. James has a disaffected teenage sister (Ryan Simpkins), and her friends, including a budding filmmaker, start to dig the weird mission to make a Brigsby feature. The movie recognizes the way cultural curiosities can turn into ironic memes, and back into sincere obsessions.

Director Dave McCrary (a writer and segment director on SNL) never makes the turn into broader, sillier comedy; for a movie about making a low-budget film based on a TV show created to placate the victim of a cult-napping, it's not especially wild. Even moreso than Mooney's sketch-comedy bits, much of Brigsby Bear perches right on the line between the comedy of awkwardness and the tragedy of loneliness. Unlike, say, a Bruce Chandling appearance, its gentle heartstring tugs occasionally feel calculated. But most of the time, it's sweetly sincere about the roots, and therapeutic value, of creativity.

During the time periods that both these two movies look back on, Mooney or Slate might have been eyed for a studio cash-in — a way to sanitize that SNL creativity for a multiplex audience. Now the (currently) viewer-rich SNL represents de facto blockbuster work, and starring in movies feels like indulging their niche on a larger canvas. Saturday Night Live movies used to be something to dread; alumni like Slate and Mooney have turned them into indie events.

]]> Fri, 28 Jul 2017 11:45:00 -0400
<![CDATA[The delirious excess of Valerian]]>










]]> Wed, 19 Jul 2017 05:45:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The domestication of War for the Planet of the Apes]]>

The original Planet of the Apes series was a franchise before the Age of Franchises. During its five-year run, a new film appeared almost annually from 1968 through 1973, and, as was typical in their time period, the sequels became progressively cheaper and hastier to produce. By contrast, the new Apes series, which comes to a conclusion this week with War for the Planet of the Apes, is a statelier affair: The special effects that bring the ape characters to life get even more detailed, convincing, and gorgeous; the ongoing story deepens and expands; and the reviews get better and better.

Yet this new Apes trilogy very much takes its cues from two of the cheaper and less well-regarded earlier entries: 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (part four), and 1973's Battle for the Planet of the Apes (part five). It's a canny mining of the series' past that avoids remaking the classic 1968 original. Tim Burton did a kinda-sorta remake back in 2001 that made a lot of money and frustrated a lot of moviegoers, sending the series into a 10-year stasis before Fox started over with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. The new movies resemble prequels, but they aren't intended to lead into the 1968 film. They're more like prequels building toward a remake that hasn't yet been made (and hopefully doesn't need to be).

War for the Planet of the Apes picks up a couple of years after Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which was set only about a decade after the basically contemporary Rise. Humankind, decimated by a simian flu that has sent apes forward in their evolution, has been mounting offenses against their ape rivals, led by Caesar (played, as before, by Andy Serkis in a motion-capture suit augmented by the work of insanely talented computer animators). The leader of the human resistance is known only as the Colonel (Woody Harrelson), and a devastating early attack leaves Caesar hungry for revenge.

The new Apes movies aren't as twisty as their ancestors, so War's trajectory isn't especially complicated. Caesar, haunted by the memory of the similarly vengeful Koba, saddles up to seek out and kill the Colonel. A few of his trusted associates insist on accompanying him, forming a sort of ape posse. On their way to the Colonel's camp, they encounter a slightly addled chimp called Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), who can also talk (Caesar speaks, but most of the others communicate in sign language) — and a young girl (Amiah Miller), who cannot.

The Colonel and the young girl are the only two human characters of any consequence, and it's a bold, smart decision from director/co-writer Matt Reeves. His Dawn spent too much time balancing out its ape story with less interesting humans, while War's ape-centric point of view echoes Conquest and Battle, which followed Caesar's development as a revolutionary.

A shift to even heavier ape action is enabled by some truly stunning — and painterly — visual effects. So many CGI representations of living things scurry and wriggle across the screen in constant motion. The Apes team recognizes the power of stillness, allowing Reeves to go in close on Caesar. A human equivalent spending this much of the movie glowering might well become insufferable, but there's nuance to the animation of Caesar's eyes and face that, at times, seems to reach beyond typical live-action performance without affixing too many effects-y curlicues. Even Zahn's more manic Bad Ape, who dresses in people clothes and provides much-needed comic relief, has weight and texture.

As a production, then, War for the Planet of the Apes is superior to a lot of the old movies. Taken together, the new Apes trilogy tells a more detailed version of the Conquest/Battle story — how apes were forced to rise up against their oppressors. In the older films, the apes had been enslaved by humans, and the uprising sparked in Conquest led to nuclear war, the aftermath of which is seen in Battle, where ape infighting threatens peace between the species. The trilogy deploys many of these elements (the human army enslaves captured apes in War, for example) with a measured thoughtfulness that sets it apart from most of its summer-blockbuster competition.

If there's a limiting factor to the new Apes movies, which are generally terrific, it's that their pacing as a series feels a touch methodical, their imagination bound up with respectability. Movie by movie, they're very entertaining, and despite its title, War touches on other genres: There's an element of westerns to the way a grizzled Caesar saddles up to confront his enemy, and the prison-break stylings of Rise are revisited in the back half of the film. It's a more eclectic and, even with all its seriousness, more fun movie than Dawn.

But there's nothing like the tonal and subject whiplash of the earlier series, which featured nuclear annihilation, time-travel, fish-out-of-water comedy, and riffs on both religion and race relations before even getting to the events of Conquest. In the context of its predecessors, that movie's revolutionary climax feels raw and even dangerous in a way that none of the current Apes movies quite touch. Part of its power derives from the earlier series' willingness, even or especially in its waning years, to both touch upon hot-button politics and to paint itself into a series of narrative corners (this is a five-movie series where the second installment ends with the nuclear destruction of Earth).

Many will refer to the new Apes trilogy as "political," and it is, in its way. The Colonel's rage at the idea of being outmoded — and his insistence that his troopers must build a wall! — will bring to mind the fearmongering and prejudice of today's White House. But War is more likely to reference Apocalypse Now (repeatedly) than real-life events that inspired movies like Apocalypse Now; the storytelling is both more grounded and more indebted to past films, Apes and otherwise.

This shouldn't take away from War for the Planet of the Apes being one of the best movies of the summer. Reeves wrings more tension from apes surreptitiously signing at each other in a prison camp than most big movies get from major visual effects smackdowns. But if the series continues, I hope it goes on some stranger, riskier tangents.

More Apes movies aren't really necessary, and that's exactly why I want to see some crazy human try to justify their efforts.

]]> Thu, 13 Jul 2017 05:55:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Like most romantic comedies now, The Big Sick puts its female lead in a coma]]>

What does it mean when the best romantic comedy of the year puts its female lead in a coma?

A hit at Sundance that's just getting a commercial release this week, The Big Sick begins with all the narrative trappings of the genre. Kumail Nanjiani, a successful Pakistani comedian, plays, well, Kumail Nanjiani, a somewhat less successful Pakistani comedian, who hooks up with an audience member named Emily, played by Zoe Kazan. They attempt to keep things casual, but as quickly as that night's drive home — he moonlights as an Uber driver, so naturally his phone goes off when she calls for a ride from his apartment — they're joking and bantering. He looks at her in the rearview mirror and it's clear that they won't be able to stay away. But then, after about 40 minutes of romance, Emily is abruptly hospitalized and placed in a medically-induced coma.

This is not a problem with the movie — it is more or less the premise, as Kumail, whose relationship with Emily has been damaged by his parents' devotion to the tradition of arranged marriage, plays awkward host to Emily's parents (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter). Nanjiani, who co-wrote the movie with his real-life spouse Emily Gordon (based on their actual courtship), squeezes the discomfort for a lot of laughs. But the turn into hospital waiting rooms doesn't really deny The Big Sick its status as a romantic comedy. In fact, it places it in a new tradition consistent with the presence of producer Judd Apatow: It's a rom-com without a girl.

Not literally, of course; Kazan is in plenty of the movie, and she's as innately charming as ever. She has the ability to appear so desperately open-hearted that her character's happiness becomes uncommonly important. There are also women in Apatow-directed-or-produced features like Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and the many movies influenced by them, like That Awkward Moment or Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Some of the female characters in these movies are interesting, well-written, and/or funny. But they share or sometimes cede the spotlight; these are romantic comedies about guys.

A decade or so ago, a reorientation of the genre's narrative around men was a novelty that broke the rom-coms away from forced zaniness and lavish wedding fantasies. But the dude takeover may have convinced studios that the distaff versions weren't worth producing anymore. In retrospect, a pair of friends-with-benefits rom-coms from 2011, No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits, feel like a turning point, halfway between Apatow coming-of-age raunch and tidier, glossier romance. There have been few wide-release female-centric rom-coms since then — the kind of movies that Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, or Meg Ryan used to make. By the time Amy Schumer played with this formula to great effect with Trainwreck, there were so few studio rom-coms that it was more often described as a female version of an Apatow comedy (not least because he directed it).

In one sense, this is a positive step, coinciding as it does with the rise of female-driven general comedies. Back in the '90s, movies like Bridesmaids, The Boss, The Heat, or Snatched, among others, might not have been retrofitted into outright rom-com, but they certainly would have at least featured more prominent male love interests. There are other things women can do on screen besides fall in love, certainly, and newer comic stars like Melissa McCarthy and Amy Schumer seem to recognize that.

It's also not as if great romantic comedies have disappeared. Two of the best of recent years, Obvious Child and Sleeping with Other People, are no less masterful for their limited theatrical releases. Still, it's odd to see a genre traditionally aimed at and starring women get turned over to male self-improvement.

The Big Sick isn't a total bro-down, but it features plenty of Apatow hallmarks: the group of comedian friends who trade riffy insults; the weirdo roommate; the tributes to the essential messiness of domestication. Structurally, its rearrangement of relationship hallmarks is clever: Instead of Kumail meeting his girlfriend's parents over a zany weekend getaway, he meets them through a situation defined by Emily's absence — and winning them over becomes part of his realization that he might need to win her back, too, if he gets the chance. Romano and Hunter are very funny as the unexpected quasi-in-laws, as are Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff as Kumail's traditionalist parents. This is a charming, culturally specific movie.

But as a romantic comedy (which seems to be part of the movie's identity), it does feel imbalanced. By necessity, Kazan stops providing tension of her own through dialogue or action, and as heartwrenching as her situation is at first, the narrative falls into place a little too easily without her. This isn't the first time Kazan has been pushed out of her own movie by a smart conceit; it even happened in one she wrote, Ruby Sparks, where she played a fictional character made flesh, dating her writer creator. The movie was too busy making its point about toxic "nice guys" to let its own characters come to life.

That's not a problem with The Big Sick, which comes to life just fine. But it's a little unsettling to consider that what might turn out to be the best romantic comedy of the year depends so heavily on a girlfriend in a coma.

]]> Thu, 22 Jun 2017 05:55:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Why Transformers 5 is worth cherishing]]>

The newest Transformers movie is a rare thing: A fifth installment. As sequel-happy as studios can be, not that many franchises make it all the way to a fifth movie, and even fewer get there with the same director, in this case the unmistakable Michael Bay.

There are plenty of film series with five or more entries: Star Wars, James Bond, Marvel ... even DC is about to get there. But these series are all designed to weather cast changes, shifts in focus, and different filmmakers. They aren't traditional sequels like Transformers: The Last Knight or even Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, a pair of rare part fives attempting to gin up business this summer.

Both Pirates and Transformers command unusually large, elaborate productions for part fives. This wasn't the case for, say, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which despite following a big hit had its budget slashed during production, or Rocky V, which followed the popular Rocky IV with a more stripped-down approach. The combination of booming overseas markets and a well-oiled Hollywood marketing machine means that Pirates and Transformers are both as opulent-looking as ever.

The hugeness of these productions is supposed to make Pirates and Transformers both irresistible to general audiences and loathsome to critics, but I admit, I'm a sucker for the sense of scale both series are able to summon, even as they grow long in the tooth. Both Dead Men and The Last Knight look and feel big, with shimmery color-timing, elaborate physical-looking sets, and frequently impressive special effects. These may be surface pleasures, but they're not a given in big summer movies.

Something does happen, though, when these series motor through five extra-long chapters in a fairly short period: Despite all the money on screen, they resemble simulations of themselves.

Dead Men Tell No Tales occupies an awkward perch between nostalgic sequel (bringing back characters from the first three movies, however briefly) and an attempt at a fresh start. The Last Knight, meanwhile, keeps spinning out nonsensical mythology that can barely sustain itself in a single scene of Anthony Hopkins-delivered exposition. Mark Wahlberg returns for a second go-round as failed inventor Cade Yaeger, now on the run from a government that wants to eradicate any Transformers, good or bad, who keep arriving on Earth. Some of them, it turns out, have been here a very long time (something previously covered in Age of Extinction), and the movie's treatment of these hows and whys is typically murky and faux-urgent. This is to say, everyone has to shout their lines, be it Wahlberg or Hopkins, two vastly different performers who share an inability to be effective when shouting all the time.

Just as the Pirates series has risen and fallen with the fervor of Johnny Depp appreciation over the past 15 years, the Transformers movies track their own superstar — not the robots or even the humans, but director Michael Bay. Presumably he's the one encouraging all the shouting. Bay never seems interested in making a Spielbergian family-adventure film, even when he's handed the ingredients; The Last Knight even introduces a gaggle of smartmouthed child characters, only to dismiss all but one of them in favor of Wahlberg's self-righteous Optimus Prime worship.

This is where The Last Knight blows any potential advantages of its sequel status. Compromised part fives like Final Frontier or Rocky V may not have worked, but they did (at least theoretically) attempt to grapple with their characters' aging and failings. Optimus, the leader of the good-guy Transformers, has appeared in every film so far, and he's still the same pompous speechifier with a grim, hair-trigger temper. The Last Knight tries to mix it up by making Prime go bad (he briefly adopts the awesome moniker “Nemesis Prime”) and the only mild shocks are a.) that he did not try to destroy Earth earlier and b.) how, if anything, being evil makes him slightly less insufferable. The movie only responds by extolling him further, rewarding Cade's bizarre faith in his not-really-friend.

Earlier in the series, the human heroes' affinity for the Transformers felt like a strange endorsement of permanent armed occupation, with the robots standing in for Americans and the whole world standing in for the Middle East. Age of Extinction (part four) briefly toyed with an immigration metaphor. The Last Knight pivots by giving every robot character who stands taller than two feet a major capacity for violence; even friendly Bumblebee gets a flashback where he machine-guns bad guys back in World War II, and a British butler bot seethes with murderous rage. They're less like characters than ever, and more like elaborate weapons — so maybe this is Bay's way of railing against gun control? The Transformers are machines built primarily for violence, but they can theoretically protect us, so we have to live with them, dammit.

The chilling glimpses at Bay's ideology may vary, but the incoherent storytelling and the shots of humans sliding down tilted surfaces as light streams around them remain the same. The Last Knight is, in the end, like a lot of other Transformers movies. It is neither the most racist (that would be Revenge of the Fallen) nor entirely free of racism. It's neither the longest (that would be Age of Extinction) nor the least tedious. It has some wonderfully loopy sci-fi notions (a duplicitous Transformer god; robots giving an all-powerful sword to a drunken Merlin) and a lot of boring scenes.

By most standards, Transformers is a pretty weird series, full of ridiculous mythology, crazed overacting, and copious rewriting of history. But five movies in, even its auteurist quirks now feel pretty normal.

]]> Wed, 21 Jun 2017 05:35:01 -0400
<![CDATA[How Tom Cruise's career got mummified]]>

There's a sequence a little more than halfway through the new version of The Mummy where Tom Cruise, playing a military man with a major sideline in stolen antiquities, attempts to outrun a massive mummy-created sandstorm, and also jumps through a storm-tossed bus as it's hurled into his path. In other words: Tom Cruise-type stuff, familiar from six Mission: Impossible movies.

The weird thing, though, is that for most of his career, Tom Cruise was not an action star. Even Top Gun, which vaulted him from promising stardom to full-on superstardom in 1986, isn't really an action movie. It's a taming-of-the-hotshot drama, which was Cruise's ultra-specialized genre of choice early on. The Color of Money, Days of Thunder, and Cocktail all follow Cruise achieving excellence at a trade (often sort of a pointless one) while learning to be a slightly better man. It's a formula, but it doesn't have to produce Cocktail; to an extent, better movies like A Few Good Men and Edge of Tomorrow also follow this recipe.

As Cruise matured as an actor, he took on riskier projects and worked with an enviable line-up of filmmakers. Between 1996 and 2008, he made movies with Steven Spielberg (twice), Stanley Kubrick, Cameron Crowe (twice), Brian De Palma, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Redford, Bryan Singer, and Michael Mann. But since his perceived meltdown circa 2005 while promoting War of the Worlds, Cruise has regrouped and retreated into damage-control mode. He seems intensely concerned with proving that he hasn't lost his movie-star mojo.

Where his movies once toyed with the Cruise golden-boy image, his movies from this decade often convert it into a kind of man-of-action stoicism derived from his Mission: Impossible character, Ethan Hunt. For The Mummy, he's plugged into the kind of role that might typically go to a Chris (Hemsworth, Pratt, Pine; take your pick). Fifty-something Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a sort of a jerk version of Indiana Jones who plunders ancient treasure and sells it on the black market when he can.

This is how he gets mixed up with archeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), accidentally helps to awaken the mummified Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), and becomes ensnared in her mummy curse. The movie takes advantage of Cruise's willingness to run and jump — and also to get knocked around. He takes some blows mentally, too, haunted by visions of his partner (Jake Johnson), and by Ahmanet herself.

Cruise projects are rarely terrible. Even his junkier movies have a decent quality filter, and he's never less than fully committed to his material. His performance in something like Jack Reacher doesn't dig as deep as his work in Magnolia or Vanilla Sky, but there's a different kind of pleasure in the unfussy wielding of his star power. In Edge of Tomorrow, his best recent film, he gives a movie-star performance that's downright dazzling. Cruise may be worthy of better roles, but few major stars have such a flair for bouncing off the ground. But in The Mummy, that ground feels further beneath him than usual.

Weirder still, the movie is often satisfying on its own silly terms. The Mummy is intended to kickstart the "Dark Universe," a series of films capitalizing on Universal Pictures' classic monsters (the Mummy, the Wolfman, Dracula, etc.), which sounded like a recipe for defanging those wonderful creatures. But this is more of a proper horror-adventure than the more directly Indiana Jones-y 1999 version of The Mummy. It's fun enough watching Cruise fight his way through the Lady Mummy's skeletal corpse minions, and grapple with Russell Crowe, playing a Dr. Jekyll reconceived as the head of a monster-tracking organization that's clearly supposed to be the Dark Universe's version of SHIELD from the Marvel movies or Monarch from the new Godzilla/Kong series.

But the Cruise shtick — indefatigable energy levels, cockiness, selfishness giving way to heroism — doesn't always gel with the horror bits. The Mummy is actually most compelling when it goes full-on B-movie monster mash, like when it focuses on its fabulously self-possessed villain. Boutella could have used more scenes to herself, or even opposite Cruise's character, who she vexes, entices, and nearly enslaves. But unlike Cruise, she gets the extravagant-B-movie tone.

The Mummy does wind up offering a novel twist on the Cruise self-improvement narrative — and his late-career monkishness. As with his action bona fides, Cruise's positioning as a romantic star was always a little overblown, a combination of dopey romances from his early films and the success of the lovely Jerry Maguire. In his late period movies, Cruise strenuously avoids romance; even if he starts out selfish or even flirtatious, he's far more likely to opt for honorable sacrifice or mentoring than a kiss. This has always been part of the Cruise persona; even Maguire has more than a hint of pragmatism animating its central relationship. But The Mummy takes it to an extreme, where Nick Morton begins the movie having already slept with Jenny Halsey, off-camera — and then they barely touch for the rest of the running time (except, of course, when he's saving her life).

One of the problems might be that Boutella is so much more interesting than Wallis — and that engaging with Ahmanet more directly, more often, might expose the film to a more complicated sexuality than it seems to be comfortable with. That may be, too, why this Mummy isn't all that scary. A force as exacting as Tom Cruise can certainly bob and weave his way through living corpses and look flummoxed in the moment. But he refuses to fully relinquish a sense of control, muting the movie's horrors. Cruise's steadiness powers a lot of his late-period action movies. In The Mummy it starts to feel like a constraint.

]]> Fri, 09 Jun 2017 05:31:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Why is Ridley Scott suddenly back in the Alien business?]]>

For its first 30 or so years of existence, the Alien series, whatever its ups or downs, was a model of franchise-by-auteur. By most accounts, this was an accident of behind-the-scenes growing pains as much as a creative ethos. But it was an accident that resulted in each entry being made by a different and distinct filmmaker: Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet made four vastly different movies out of similar material. Even a disreputable cash-grab crossover movie during a low ebb for the series, Alien vs. Predator, is very much the product of its B-movie maestro, Paul W.S. Anderson.

But in 2012, Ridley Scott, director of the 1979 original, returned to the series. Scott's hotly anticipated Prometheus was a prequel to Alien; it didn't exactly feature the iconic multi-mouthed creature designed by H.R. Giger, but explored the origins of early forms of that creature. Now Scott and the creature have returned for Alien: Covenant, part sequel (to Prometheus) and part prequel (to Alien, again).

It's a strange and surprising direction for the series, even as it conforms to modern Hollywood rules that even well-respected A-list directors should engage in franchise maintenance. Scott has one of the more eclectic resumes in mainstream cinema, with hits as diverse as Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down, The Martian, and American Gangster, as well as his groundbreaking Blade Runner. For decades, he never revisited his own material. Now he's made two Alien prequels and plans to make at least one more.

So why is Ridley Scott suddenly in the Alien business again?

It's a knotty question in part because Scott's eclecticism disguises what amounts to a journeyman's career. His films are polished, well-assembled, stylish, and a little bit more anonymous than his reputation suggests. A close look at his filmography does reveal certain thematic commonalities — he likes to see characters fight or puzzle their way out of extreme circumstances, and often shows an interest in unfussy professionalism — but Alien is so great that it dwarfs a lot of his other work. There isn't much to chew on in the slick entertainment of The Martian.

But it's nearly impossible to make an Alien movie without subtext, and in Alien: Covenant, Scott runs with the opportunity so eagerly he sometimes forgets the "sub" part. In the opening sequence, a prequel to the events of Prometheus, a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) chats with his android creation David (Michael Fassbender). If you created me, David wants to know, then who created you? "It's a question for the ages," Pearce then has to say, out loud.

Scott obviously agrees. Prometheus followed David and some human scientists on a mission to discover their deep-space origins. Covenant initially picks up with a different spaceship crew, complete with Walter, their own android — also played by Fassbender, but in an exaggerated flattened-out semi-American accent to emphasize his compliance, as contrasted with David's haughtier, more mischievous English tones. The crew is leading a colonization mission to a planet that may be hospitable to human life, but get woken up from cryo-sleep early by a ship malfunction. They also pick up a signal from another, much closer planet, that the captain (Billy Crudup) thinks may be an even better environment for their new beginning.

It's difficult to say more about the plot of Covenant without spoiling it, especially because it's structured as a mystery — not to the characters so much as to the nerds in the audience, wondering how or if this can tie into the events of Prometheus. Suffice to say that the crew does encounter our old friend David, and his tinkering with alien life forms seen in the previous movie has continued offscreen. His creations are moving toward that perfect killing machine first seen in Alien. In Prometheus, they looked like distant cousins. In Covenant, they look like close siblings.

Fassbender's double role is one of the best non-technical things about Covenant, which like its predecessor is gorgeously shot and designed, with some truly stunning spaceship interiors and futuristic pointillist holograms. Scott sometimes resorts to boilerplate visual tricks like toying with frame rates, and there's some of that during the movie's action bits. But he also ups his game in quieter scenes, like one where David tries to teach Walter how to play music on a pipe. It's an eerie Fassbender-on-Fassbender sort-of seduction where the camera keeps drifting between the two of them, floating with delicious tension as they size each other up.

The fully human characters, though, are even sketchier than last time. Katherine Waterston plays a sort of proto-Ripley, but doesn't have the natural grit of Sigourney Weaver — not that the movie gives her much chance to show it, anyway. Danny McBride avoids comic-relief shtick and is a welcome presence on the crew. Many of the rest (including a cameoing James Franco) are far more interchangeable than the near-identical Fassbender characters, and often treated as cannon fodder. Scott asks questions about humanity while appearing less interested in it than ever; his heart clearly belongs to the scheming androids and vicious aliens.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe Scott identifies with David, even at his most wicked, because his actions mirror Scott's strategy with these Alien prequels: The filmmaker is also tinkering, adjusting different ingredients (mourning but strong woman; seemingly subservient but possibly nefarious robot; Alien-like aliens) until, presumably, the series arrives at the moments before the first film. He's opening up his original creation and seeing what makes it tick.

And so Covenant is far less smooth than the elemental simplicity of the original film, so often described as a haunted house in space. It's kind of a retread of Alien, kind of a continuation of Prometheus, and kind of a mad scientist/monster movie with the order of operations scrambled. Some of it is genuinely bonkers, and some of it is just more stalking and goring.

That scrambled, searching quality makes Covenant both oddly satisfying and satisfyingly odd, even if many of its plot turns are predictable and its non-Fassbender characters negligible (they seem designed to disappear before the next iteration, just as few Prometheus cast members made it to this movie). It feels more revealing than the typical Scott movie, and it reveals a deep skepticism of the very process of creation, especially of creating life. There's reproductive unease at the core of many Alien movies, but Scott's prequels turn the very thought of creating anything in one's own image or whims as a doomed proposition.

This is both the strength and the peculiar weakness of Alien: Covenant. It feels very much a product of Ridley Scott — and even helps clarify what that even means. Yet more than the original quartet of Alien pictures, it's to some degree about itself — an Alien movie about the perversity of making Alien movies. It also, in conjunction with the underrated Prometheus and the as-yet-unmade sequel, feels drawn out. Though his Alien prequels rank among his best mid-to-late period films, they make you understand why so many other filmmakers were ready to cut and run.

]]> Fri, 19 May 2017 05:40:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Get ready for the backlash against Amy Schumer's new comedy]]>

Amy Schumer's funny new comedy Snatched is going to disappoint a lot of people.

The sketch series that helped propel Schumer to fame — Inside Amy Schumer — doesn't yet have an official airdate for its fifth season. Meanwhile, she'll star in a new Netflix stand-up special this year and at least two movies: the upcoming drama Thank You For Your Service as well as the just-opening Snatched. Yet it seems inevitable that the latter will be greeted with some of the same complaints elicited by comedies like Sisters (starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler of Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, and Parks and Recreation), Keanu (starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele of their Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele), and even Schumer's better-reviewed Trainwreck. You were so funny, fresh, and subversive on TV! Why is your big-screen vehicle so silly, so lightweight, so conventional?

Snatched's set-up will be familiar to fans of Schumer's shorter-form work. After a semi-oblivious, self-obsessed Emily is dumped by her boyfriend just before their planned vacation to Ecuador, she sulks at the suburban home of her attentive but nervous mother Linda (Goldie Hawn!). Though the screenplay was written by the very funny Katie Dippold (The Heat, Parks and Recreation), Schumer always seems particularly attuned to behavioral tics, in both Emily's solo activities (mostly posting to Instagram) and her interactions with her mother (who calls her NYC-resident daughter to warn her about a crime spree happening in Delaware). When Emily suggests that her mother come with her to Ecuador, Linda is aghast: "Everyone knows you need two years to plan a vacation!" But she acquiesces, and eventually the two wind up kidnapped in South America.

This kicker could easily turn up on Inside Amy Schumer, though a sketch version would likely have ended shortly thereafter. Snatched continues, though, as Emily and Linda attempt to evade their captors and find their way to safety. The extreme nature of this situation gives the comedy a little extra menace, but mostly the South American locations (played by Hawaii) are an excuse to go broader, as Schumer and Hawn bicker and pratfall their way through the jungle.

Dippold and Schumer are too smart to avoid spoofing white-lady vanity (as Emily wants to mine her experiences for internet compliments) and paranoia (as the situation plays out like something from Linda's worst nightmares of foreign travel). But those aren't really the subjects of Snatched; this is foremost a mother-daughter comedy about the frustration and affection of such a close relationship. In the end, nothing about this movie is especially subversive.

So while the satirical details are often similar, Snatched is a far cry from Schumer's TV work. Inside Amy Schumer made its well-deserved reputation on often-lacerating sketches that address social issues and foibles: A group of expectant mothers smugly compete to reject the greatest volume of Western medical practices; a group of friends show off how they've been trained never to accept compliments. Throughout, Schumer is unafraid to make herself look sloppy, selfish, or mean. In contrast, Snatched has a scene where her character bonds with South American natives, and while there's a hint of self-deprecation to the interactions, the moment is mostly there to make Emily look less monstrously selfish than she did before.

I'm sure, then, that some fans will blame the movie's lack of serrated edge on the scourge of movie-mandated likability — that Emily and Linda must learn lessons from each other through this ordeal. Admittedly, those lessons are a little pat, and as the movie tacks toward a vaguely deferential attitude towards parents ("I should have listened to you," etc.) it does reveal more traditional values, just as Trainwreck revealed itself as a romantic comedy, not an acidic satire of one. But if we can agree that subversion is a great quality in a comedy, is it also required to make a good one?

Given the reaction that greeted Jordan Peele's (wonderful) Get Out as opposed to Key and Peele's (quite funny) Keanu, there's certainly a hunger for familiar TV comedians to push their work further. But Keanu does address issues of identity central to its black characters, and the relationships in the Poehler/Fey bash Sisters, like Snatched, feel borne from real experiences, even if the movie doesn't warm hearts like Parks and Rec or satirize culture like 30 Rock.

Snatched is "only" funny and it still maintains its star's clear comic voice — not something that can be said for many sloppier mainstream studio comedies. Director Jonathan Levine orchestrates the action with less fuss than his last broad comedy, The Night Before; he gives the physical comedy plenty of space, including a gag that is entirely predictable but still almost made me pass out laughing because of its framing.

Certainly, the movie could have given Hawn more to do; her character comes through more clearly in the opening half-hour than she does when she goes on the run. But the zippy, occasionally slapdash watchability of Snatched (or Sisters, or Keanu) doesn't have to be a letdown. It's not meant to be shared on Facebook walls as a vital piece of cultural criticism. It's a movie comedy with a point of view. Is that really so disappointing?

]]> Fri, 12 May 2017 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Is John Cena the second coming of The Rock?]]>

One of the biggest movie stars in the world is a former professional wrestler. This may seem like a small matter now that the actual president of the United States was an actual reality show star, but consider, too, how good so many people feel about the ascension of Dwayne Johnson. Not only do we put the man once known as The Rock in the highest echelon of movie stars, but we celebrate him as a American treasure.

But can his success be replicated? Can another wrestler make the leap from the ring to the pantheon of stardom? It's a question that seems to consume John Cena, the wrestler who looks most likely to match Johnson's career and whose new movie The Wall opens this week.

Cena, of course, isn't the first wrestler to try following Johnson's footsteps, and he won't be the last. Dave Bautista can also be seen on multiplex screens right now, reprising his role of Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and stealing plenty of scenes. But Bautista may not ultimately escape the general wrestler-on-film fate of novelty; however wonderful he is as Drax, his highest-profile role in between Guardians movies was playing a hired goon in a James Bond movie.

By contrast, Cena began his film career doing exactly the type of low-rent action movies you'd expect a wrestler to grapple with, the only surprise being that both The Marine and 12 Rounds were wide theatrical releases at all. But he signaled a desire to branch out, just like Johnson did, by expanding from meat-headed action flicks to comedy: In 2015, he had funny supporting roles in the lady-centric comedies Trainwreck and Sisters, and last year he hosted Saturday Night Live (Johnson hosts the season finale later this month, his fifth hosting gig at a show that, in retrospect, looks like a major proving ground for him). Cena's SNL shot wasn't a revelation, but it served as a reminder that he's willing to goof around.

The Wall is not goofing around, but it's another form of stretching for Cena, at least on paper. It's trying to be a dramatic thriller, a bit removed from the poor-man's-Arnold-Schwarzenegger realm of The Marine. Cena plays a soldier partnered up with Aaron Taylor-Johnson to check out reports of sniper fire at a construction site in Iraq; for most of the running time, he and Taylor-Johnson are the only two faces onscreen. It sounds like a major showcase, but when the movie separates its stars, its point of view sticks with Taylor-Johnson, which removes Cena from the action for long stretches and turns him into something of a prop. This isn't Cena's fault, and even makes sense for the type of movie The Wall turns out to be. This isn't a serious recent-history thriller, but a '90s-style talking-killer picture, where a calm and erudite mastermind menaces the heroes and taunts one of them with that old chestnut: "We aren't so different, you and I." Despite some gripping moments, it's a dead end.

So where does Cena go from here?

Cena's biggest problem is that borderline cartoonish brawniness isn't something movies need anymore. If movies need to depict brawn, it's just as easy to cast a "normal" (extremely good-looking, usually English) actor, make him hit the gym, and CG the rest. This isn't something to mourn; it may be difficult for some people to suss out the differences between Chris Pine, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, and Chris Pratt (as Pine himself joked on his own SNL episode last weekend), but every one of them is more charismatic than the typical late-'80s action star. That's why as many Dwayne Johnson movies wink at his impossible physique as take it seriously; as discussed on this podcast, he and his Fast and Furious costar Vin Diesel both jumped into the image-spoofing phase of their careers (placing them with unruly kids or assigning them zany hijinks) earlier than Arnold.

Cena isn't really famous enough for that yet, so it made sense for him to take on supporting roles in more adult-oriented comedies. But he has yet to demonstrate a physicality as delicate as The Rock's — he cuts an imposing figure, but not necessarily a fascinating one. He might be better off attempting to claim the character-actor career that Vin Diesel has mostly abdicated. In other words, he could try stealing scenes in movies that aren't exclusively comedies. A background as a wrestler makes sense for developing a movie star "brand," but not everyone is as talented or as brandable as Dwayne Johnson.

So if Cena is serious about the movies, he may just have to set aside the notion of starring in them.

]]> Thu, 11 May 2017 05:32:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Can the girls of Girls make it in Hollywood?]]>

What will the girls of Girls do next? Lena Dunham's incisive, often hilarious dramedy series ends Sunday night, and while she has made seemingly sincere overtures about revisiting the characters for a Sex and the City-style future movie, it's safe to say that the series' cast will be embarking on other endeavors for now. Some of the actors may well find another television series, but Dunham got her start in feature films, and many of her coworkers have done some movie-land moonlighting during their show's six seasons. Now that they're all free of their HBO commitment, what might the four core Girls look like on the big screen?

It's a little bit surprising that more hints aren't out there already; Game of Thrones folks started popping up in studio movies pretty quickly, but the ladies of Girls — Dunham, Jemima Kirke, Allison Williams, and Zosia Mamet — have made themselves scarcer. The biggest hit any of them have experienced just came out this year, when Allison Williams played the female lead in the sociological horror smash Get Out. It's her first real movie role, and by the end of its theatrical run will have been seen by approximately 20 million people. In contrast, the highest-rated episode of Girls ever barely crested the one-million mark.

Strange, then, to consider that most people watching Get Out aren't aware of Williams' baggage as Marnie, probably the least-liked of the show's central foursome. Her work on Girls has been fearless in her willingness to appear disagreeable and uptight, which makes her warmth in the early scenes of Get Out all the more impressive, while still retaining a hint of Marnie in her reminder of her (black) boyfriend to bring his "cozy clothes" on a weekend trip to meet her (white) parents. She also gets a huge laugh later in the movie by simply sipping milk through a straw. How this skill set, and her nuanced depiction of entitlement in Girls, will translate to other movies is a little tricky to discern. It's easy to imagine her getting shoehorned into the nagging girlfriend role in some mediocre bro comedy, which would be a shame. The Girls episode "The Panic in Central Park" offers ample evidence of her range.

But going by films alone, the rangiest (and most experienced) of the four is Zosia Mamet, who logged bit parts in indies like Greenberg and The Kids Are All Right in between recurring roles on a few pre-Girls TV shows. During the show's run, she's been in the kinds of indie movies that often play the Tribeca Film Festival, as Bleeding Heart did in 2015 and as The Boy Downstairs will in just a few weeks. Mamet's Shoshanna, who delivered a memorably dispassionate kiss-off to the other ladies in the penultimate episode, is the most distinctly stylized character on the show, with her rapid-fire dialogue delivery and expressive eyes. It's easy — probably too easy — to assume that Dunham, Williams, and Kirke are playing extensions of themselves, something Williams in particular has rightfully complained about. But Mamet has more room to pivot elsewhere, as she does in Bleeding Heart, where she plays a prostitute who may be the long-lost sister of the movie's lead. The movie is slight, but Mamet breathes life into a potentially stock part. She plays a similarly lost, though more self-confident, young woman in the final segment of Wiener-Dog, paying a token visit to her grandmother in obvious hopes of squeezing her for some money.

In her indies, Mamet seems willing to mine the kind of unpleasantness often associated with her co-stars — a departure from instant fan favorite Shoshanna, who has made her share of nasty comments (and is a "mean drunk," per the third-season episode "Beach House") but also maintains a certain level of wannabe-Sex and the City pluck. Mamet could make a winning rom-com heroine, although she clearly goes after character actor roles — she's in Under the Silver Lake, due out later this year. I hope I see her in several movies a year for the next 50 years.

On the opposite end from Mamet is her on-screen cousin Jemina Kirke, the least experienced performer of the four. Apart from some cameos and as-yet-undetermined roles in a couple of as-yet-unreleased movies, Kirke has mostly just acted for her real-life schoolmate Dunham, in her film Tiny Furniture and on Girls, playing similar characters. She reported tried to quit Girls early in the show's run, and perpetually seems more interested in her work as a painter and a mother. Maybe she pushed her sister Lola, star of Mistress America, into the business to satiate demands for Kirke's acting.

That just leaves Dunham, who isn't just the star of Girls but its creator — and, as such, a writer, director, and producer. Hopefully she will deliver a follow-up to Tiny Furniture; her work has only gotten better since that hilarious, barbed indie made the rounds seven years ago. Hollywood is notoriously unkind to female directors, and though it's possible that Dunham harbors a secret desire to make a movie about, say, Namor the Sub-Mariner, she will most likely occupy that dangerous, disappearing middle ground between micro-budget indie and lavish big-budget spectacle.

It seems entirely possible that Dunham might have to continue taking acting gigs to supplement or boost her work as a director. As an on-camera presence, she has experience acting for filmmakers of a similar sensibility, from her Girls collaborator Judd Apatow (This is 40) to mumblecore impresario Joe Swanberg (Happy Christmas). Dunham is often delightful in supporting roles, particularly in Happy Christmas, but her work on Girls, particularly in this final season, has been exceptional.

In the recent episode "What Do We Do This Time About Adam?" her character Hannah reunites with her ex-boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver) based on his professed desire to help raise her impending child. But doubts visibly nag at her in the back half of this dreamy episode, and by Hannah and Adam's final scene together, their mutual acknowledgment that this rush back into a relationship cannot work plays out entirely on their faces. Driver has been tagged as a breakout on the show from the beginning — more on this in a moment — but Dunham matches and surpasses him in this scene, as affection, regret, sadness, and resolve all pass over her quavering face. It's a particularly lovely moment among many from her time on the show.

Of course, only one of the two people in this scene is also in Star Wars. Though the writing and production of Girls, along with writing a memoir and a book of short stories, has doubtless kept Dunham busy even when she's not appearing on camera, it's a little galling to consider how the biggest post-Girls bumps so far have gone to, well, boys.

Driver is obviously the big one, playing Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens and appearing in movies by Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Jim Jarmusch, and Noah Baumbach, among others. It's hard to fault these filmmakers for casting him, and harder still to fault Driver for racking up such a terrific resume. But the boy bump goes further: The first Girls cast member to get a starring vehicle was actually Christopher Abbott, the guy who played Marnie's on-and-off boyfriend Charlie for two seasons (and one fifth-season episode). His title role in James White wasn't widely seen, but it was well-reviewed despite indulging in the kind of tedious solipsism Dunham has been accused of, minus any traces of humor. And tiny release notwithstanding, it's a bigger part than Mamet, Williams, or Kirke have ever played in a movie.

Even the more offbeat Alex Karpovsky, so good as Ray on Girls, has notched bigger credits than many of the girls, with a couple of Coen Brothers movies and a starring role in the upcoming Folk Hero and Funny Guy. He makes an appealingly awkward stand-up comic in that film, but it would be a stretch to say he has a presence that explains why he's leapfrogged over Williams or Mamet. None of the Girls quartet are probably fated to become movie stars on the level of Sandra Bullock or Dwayne Johnson, but the same combination of charisma and subtlety that made them all so compelling on Dunham's show should be able to translate to film, even if that industry still favors offbeat, complicated men over women with similar qualities. Hopefully they can elbow their way into yet another boys' club.

]]> Thu, 13 Apr 2017 05:39:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Alec Baldwin, master of boss baby cartoons and boss baby presidents]]>

The Boss Baby gives Alec Baldwin his highest-profile movie role in nearly a decade. Granted, it's a cartoon where Baldwin's face does not appear ... but his face is arguably no longer his best-known feature.

Baldwin's rumbling purr of a voice, the one that narrated The Royal Tenenbaums and so beautifully spun one-liners on 30 Rock, has become instantly recognizable. Lending that voice to an infant who secretly takes charge of his new family (much to the chagrin of his suspicious 7-year-old brother) makes Baldwin the movie's second lead, and puts his name above the title on some of its posters.

This marketing campaign coincides with another, higher-profile gig: Baldwin has spent the past six months as Saturday Night Live's Donald Trump. Baldwin's take on Trump, more satisfyingly nasty than the impressionists who came before him, depends in part on an incongruity that's essentially the reverse of the Boss Baby gag. Rather than playing an adorable baby who looks harmless but harbors secretly ruthless business instincts, Baldwin's Trump is an ill-tempered grotesque who has somehow ascended to the nation's highest office despite a childlike petulance and limited understanding of the world.

They're complementary roles, and represent something of a culmination for Baldwin. He started out as an impossibly handsome movie star (he was the screen's first Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October), but never became a full-on superstar like his Ryan successor Harrison Ford, or his contemporaries like Tom Hanks or Kevin Costner. The key to Baldwin's future, it turned out, was in his curtain-raising cameo for the film version of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Baldwin was so funny, lacerating, and intimidating as the guy who lays out the stakes for the office of desperate real-estate scammers ("Third prize is you're fired") that the scene, written by Mamet specifically for the film, has become the piece's signature, and was even re-integrated into future stage incarnations.

Baldwin took a few more stabs at matinee idol heroism (he played a superhero in The Shadow before the genre had really caught on), but Glengarry gave him an outlet for that menace and bluster that made him a slightly strange fit for standard movie-star parts.

Baldwin had plenty of lead roles after the mid-'90s, but he played so many intimidating bosses and heavies that he wound up a marquee-level character actor. At the same time, he was building a reputation as a frequent, versatile, and game host of Saturday Night Live. His character and comedy work helped lead him to the killer part of Jack Donaghy, smooth-talking boss of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) on 30 Rock. Donaghy was at once a broad parody of alpha-male masculinity and one of Baldwin's most multifaceted, shaded characters, so it makes sense that it would then inform his future roles. His new DreamWorks Animation cartoon character in The Boss Baby is not unlike something out of an imaginary 30 Rock Babies spinoff.

Maybe that's why The Boss Baby, and even sometimes his SNL bits, feel like a letdown in the context of Baldwin's career. The Boss Baby is easier to diagnose; it's a DreamWorks cartoon, and like a lot of those, it's overly antic with flashes of visual invention and verbal wit that only make the rest of it seem a little worse. The movie doesn't need to provide cutting-edge satire, but it might have worked better if it at least showed more than a rudimentary understanding of the mentality it's supposed to be spoofing. For example, the Boss Baby (unnamed in the film) is introduced donning sunglasses and strut-shimmying down the sidewalk, not in a satire of corporate culture or even some other movie version of corporate culture, but because that's what DreamWorks cartoon characters do. They're constantly in search of a dance-party ending, or a dance-party beginning.

Despite these pandering flourishes, the real surprise of The Boss Baby is how much funnier the animation is than Baldwin's performance. I don't think this is his fault. While there are some moments that take advantage of Baldwin's gravitas (he recites synonyms for "pacifier" like he's rattling off a list of designer drugs), the movie doesn't have much of an ear for satirical corporate speak. And as indulgent as DreamWorks is of animation's ability to go loud and frantic, The Boss Baby also works best when it fuses the sensibilities of a stubborn infant with those of a self-possessed executive, as when the baby imperiously slaps away a parent's helping hand when drinking from his bottle. Like many of the movie's best baby-related gags, it's a visual moment, not a verbal one.

Baldwin's appearances as Trump on Saturday Night Live are pretty visual, too — that pinched scowl, the stiff gesticulating. Darrell Hammond, who played Trump on the show during the less terrifying Apprentice years and briefly reprised him last season, has a more technically precise version (though even that faltered a bit when he brought it back). But Baldwin's willingness to go more vicious — to make Trump more ugly than cuddly — is certainly welcome on SNL, which sometimes favors easy laughs over real satire. The problem is not necessarily with Baldwin's performance but with its dynamic on the show and in his career.

Baldwin-hosted episodes of SNL used to be something to anticipate, a treat that would turn up every couple of seasons. By making him a de facto part-time cast member, the show manages to sideline its talented repertory company, limit much of Baldwin's recent work on the show to a single character, and stick a talented actor in a part that, by design, stubbornly refuses to change. That's what The Boss Baby and the Trump role have in common: They both place Baldwin front and center while asking relatively little of him. In his younger days, Baldwin seemed to chafe against his initial placement as a handsome hero when he could be weirder, scarier, and more interesting than that. Funny and vital as he can be as Trump, or exploiting that inimitable voice as a bossy baby, it might soon be time for him to resign as America's favorite fake CEO, and get back to real work.

]]> Fri, 31 Mar 2017 05:45:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Danny Boyle, the improbable master of the music video]]>

Spike Jonze. Michel Gondry. Michael Bay. David Fincher. Danny Boyle. One of these big-in-the-'90s directors is not like the others. While the first four all burst into Hollywood at the end of the 20th century by making a name for themselves in music videos, Boyle did not. Which is weird, because his visceral, fast-paced, often violent movies have a traditional music video sensibility more akin to Bay than the artier Jonze, Gondry, or Fincher.

Indeed, the Academy Award-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later, and Trainspotting lends the aesthetic a rare depth. What Boyle understands is how to use the style's fast cutting, pop music, and mobile camera to capture what his characters are feeling.

Take a scene from the Academy Award-winning director's latest film, T2: Trainspotting, out this month. After scamming a bunch of money, two reunited drug addicts — Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) — excitedly rush back to the latter's apartment, where they stay up late excitedly babbling to each other about soccer, music, and other aspects of their shared history. Though they're not on heroine, the movie uses video-style visuals (like projecting images on the outside of the car as they zoom home) and frantic editing to depict their kinetic babble — the rush of relief these characters are feeling in each other's company. The sequence looks very much like it could be a music video, and uses music, but its emotional effects in this story (very much about nostalgia, its pleasures and pitfalls) are foregrounded more than any particular pop song.

You can see this kind of facility with the genre's techniques early in Boyle's career, when his style more closely resembled traditional music videos. The original Trainspotting, for example, opens with a now-iconic montage set to Iggy Pop's pounding "Lust for Life," featuring a lot of footage of heroin addicts sprinting down a city street, away from cops. Though the framing isn't exactly a direct quotation, it's hard to watch this sequence without recalling the opening of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles film that kinda-sorta helped to invent the music video form.

Of course, it's unlikely the Beatles would have signed off on a scene where one of them dives into a toilet, as McGregor does, to search for accidentally expelled drug suppositories. That swift transition from nausea to whimsy, as the "worst toilet in Scotland" somehow turns to a peaceful underwater environment entered by McGregor's antihero to the tune of Brian Eno's "Deep Blue Day," is not a shot cribbed from an iconic piece of pop culture, but it's exactly the kind of wild leap music videos tend to take. The fact that it's a bit of reality-bending weirdness in the middle of a relatively straight sequence might be a problem for some filmmakers. But it doesn't phase Boyle, whose work tends to move swiftly and fluidly even when it sometimes threatens to jump the rails.

A similar fluidity informs the freest and most exhilarating moments of Boyle's Trainspotting follow-up, A Life Less Ordinary. This flop rom-com between McGregor and Cameron Diaz isn't one of Boyle's best, and in fact spends much of its running time riding directly on the rails, ready to jump at any moment. But it is notable for injecting a music video sensibility into a genre — romantic comedy — that's not especially known for its modern-day style. The biggest scene, for instance, is a karaoke duet performance of "Beyond the Sea" by McGregor and Diaz which, like Trainspotting's toilet, takes leave of strict reality, landing somewhere between dream and drunken hallucination. To the extent that this very strange movie comes even close to working is largely due to its psychedelic yet mournful musicality.

All of this may sound relatively simple, but it eludes plenty of others who play with the same aesthetic.

Take Michael Bay, one of the exemplars of the "MTV"-style of movie making. The blockbuster director typically uses his eye for iconography, recurring images, and ultra-stylized compositions to try to goose excitement — to make every moment of his every movie into some kind of sun-blasted, magic-houred, canted-angle event. Boyle's signature moves have a similar junkie sensation, but he actually cares about which sensations he's evoking. There's a range of emotion, from joy to terror, that other transplants like Bay haven't yet mastered.

Maybe it's his versatility within his recognizable style that has made Boyle such a nimble genre-hopper; he's made horror, sci-fi, drama, a family adventure, a romantic comedy, and whatever the hell Trance is. As T2 brings him back to his roots, he might be considering his next move, and there's at least one genre he's flirted with but never really tried.

At his best, Boyle's exuberance is reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann, another filmmaker whose work has a strong music-video influence despite his origins in theatrical, rather than MTV, productions. Luhrmann revitalized the movie musical with Moulin Rouge! — starring Boyle's sometime muse Ewan McGregor, no less. Maybe it's time for Boyle to follow suit.

]]> Wed, 22 Mar 2017 05:45:02 -0400
<![CDATA[17 years as Wolverine: Hugh Jackman's superheroic version of Boyhood]]>

With the release of Logan today, Hugh Jackman enters rarified air: The actor has now played Wolverine for almost 17 years.

When the first X-Men came out back in July 2000, George W. Bush was still six months away from assuming the presidency, and Sept. 11 was still a meaningless date. But now, nearly two decades and nine movies later, we've finally reached the end of Jackman's tenure as the Marvel Comics superhero with a metal-coated skeleton and retractable claws.

It's a remarkable display of longevity matched only by the likes of soap operas, Dr. Frasier Crane, animation, and a handful of stalwarts on decades-spanning shows like Law & Order. Indeed, few contemporary film actors can boast anything similar. When the sixth Mission: Impossible movie comes out next summer, Tom Cruise will celebrate 22 years as Ethan Hunt, and next month's eighth Fast and Furious movie arrives almost 16 years after Vin Diesel first got behind the wheel as Dominic Toretto. But apart from turning up somewhat less regularly than Wolverine, Hunt and Toretto are defined more by their unchanging archetypal consistency than their evolution. They can get disavowed, or team up with proper law enforcement, or go on the lam from everyone they know, and they always end up in more or less the same place.

But Jackman's Wolverine shows growth. Unleavened with an ensemble cast or more elaborate action sequences, Logan feels sadder and weightier than its predecessors — elegiac in a way past X-Men movies have hinted at but never really committed to. This version of Wolverine is nearly 200 years old, working as a limo driver near the U.S./Mexico border and taking care of the ailing Professor X (Patrick Stewart) as both of their former mutant powers have begun to wilt. They inhabit a world where no new mutants have been born for two decades, and any other surviving X-Men have been scattered to the wind.

It has its franchise moments, of course. Logan has been pitched as a darker, grittier take on the character, but many of the plot points to that effect have popped up in the previous X-Men movies in which he's appeared. In Logan, he mows down a ton of henchmen with his claws (like in X2 and The Wolverine), grapples with diminished superpowers (like in The Wolverine), meets a kindly regular family and inadvertently puts them in harm's way (like in X-Men Origins: Wolverine), is haunted by his past (like almost everything he's appeared in), and becomes a reluctant savior (like in most of these movies, but especially X-Men and X-Men: The Last Stand).

It would be easy for the movie to overdose on rage and anguish, but here's where long-term, semi-serialized movie franchising actually pays off: Jackman is able to summon the totality of his experiences as this character for crucial emotional shading. The movie's Logan doesn't always give you a lot emotionally — he and the movie stubbornly resist sentiment, even when Logan reluctantly (of course) takes charge of a young mutant who is the result of a lab experiment. Without the past Wolverine adventures — even the bad ones like Origins — this might feel like the cinematic equivalent of endlessly gritted, bared teeth. But calling upon the history of Wolverine as, variously, tortured loner, wisecracking tough guy, and gruff father figure works wonders for the movie's old-gunfighter vibe.

It also highlights how much of Jackman's star power comes from this single character.

This is not to deny his versatility and talent. He's made several successful forays into Broadway musicals as well as an Oscar-nominated turn in the film version of Les Miserables, and in 2006, he appeared in films by Woody Allen, Christopher Nolan, and Darren Aronofsky. The latter two, The Prestige and The Fountain, feature two of his very best performances. But elsewhere, Jackman has betrayed a weakness for garish cheese, often involving robots (Chappie; Real Steel). In movies like Miserables and Prisoners, he gives well-wrought, emotional performances; in movies like Kate & Leopold, he's in movie star mode. Wolverine, of all characters, lets him indulge, as the Andy Samberg impression of him used to bark, "two sides!"

It's especially impressive that Jackman has done this with Wolverine, who seems, on the comics page, potentially unplayable. At the very least, he has fewer easy in-roads than, say, the teenage pathos of Spider-Man or the unsuited hubris of Iron Man. Even out of his outlandish costume, Wolverine has a strange look: squat but muscular, with muttonchops and a swooping devil-horn hairdo that mimics the angles of his bizarre cowl. Jackman, meanwhile, is 6'2" and devastatingly handsome. But his turn as Wolverine masterfully humanizes a rich but often cartoonish character by adapting a few key gestures from the comics — cigar, terseness, addressing people as "bub" — and often underplaying them.

Yes, Wolverine still sometimes flips into a terrifying rage, and Jackman's theatricality serves him well when he does. But he's even better in smaller moments.

In the first X-Men, he has an easy way with Whedon-penned or Whedon-imitating quips ("This certainly is a big, round room," he deadpans in non-amazement at Professor X's mutant-locating Cerebro device). Hell, he gets a huge laugh just by calling his straightlaced teammate Cyclops a dick during a tense moment. The otherwise amusingly terrible X-Men Origins: Wolverine gets the character in a boxing ring with a massive sorta-villain called the Blob, and Jackman reveals a Harrison Ford-like capacity for taking a punch. Early in The Wolverine, he effectively shorthands a sense of mutual respect with an actual woods-dwelling bear.

Typically, a character existing for a long time in a single medium eventually veers into caricature. Yet that's not the case with Jackman's performances in The Wolverine and Logan — separated from the rest of the X-Men, he holds even tighter onto the character's humanity, even (or especially) in his action-hero suffering. As Wolverine, Jackman has played comedy, unrequited love, fatherly affection, charming rake, seething rage, and rampaging id. No wonder he spends so much of his non-Wolverine time singing and dancing; it's about the only thing he doesn't get to do in these movies.

Just as the original X-Men movie blazed the trail for a rush of superhero movies, Jackman is providing a blueprint for a graceful exit with Logan.

Traditionally, actors haven't stayed superheroes for this long. Christopher Reeve did four movies as Superman over the course of 10 years, to diminishing returns and, after a point, budgets. Tobey Maguire did three movies in five years as Spider-Man, while Andrew Garfield did two in two years. Even the stratospherically popular Batman doesn't hold onto his players. During the first run of blockbuster Bat-movies, only Michael Keaton played the part more than once, which made Christian Bale's seven-year, trilogy-only run for Christopher Nolan seem positively epic. Recent rumors hinted that Ben Affleck may be eager to bolt the role himself, despite being brought in as the cornerstone of a cinematic universe that DC Entertainment hopes will rival Marvel Studios.

It makes sense to get out earlier rather than later, and not just to avoid further contact with Zack Snyder. There have been plenty of smart, even nuanced superhero movies in the post-X-Men boom times, but it can still be tricky to steer the characters away from their roots as adolescent power fantasies. Wolverine may be tortured, but for years Jackman has been forced to tame himself into ever-more-muscular shape to look appropriately bulletproof and menacing. One of the most amazing effects in Logan wouldn't be considered special by a lot of stars: Jackman actually looks older than his 48 years of real life. There are signs of aging in the other movies, of course — how could there not be, with X-Men shot when Jackman was barely over 30 — but in Logan, nearly two decades are allowed to catch up with him all at once. Alongside the other X-Men movies, this one faintly resembles, however unintentionally, the last act of an adult, superheroic version of Boyhood.

Almost all actors age on screen, of course, minus some untimely ends or abrupt retirements. But their characters usually stay behind, or at least get extensive breaks. The X-Men series has been less meticulously planned and quality-controlled than their Marvel Studios cousins, which has led to a couple of creative dead ends, but now has resulted in a superhero who actually looks worn out from years of saving people — and a superhero movie that, in its way, depicts the passage of time.

This is notable because time is imagined to be endless in modern franchises. They're supposed to be perpetual-motion machines with no obstacle that can't be overcome by rebooting, recasting, retconning, or 12-picture contracts. This will doubtless prove true for the X-Men, too; at least three more X-universe movies will be out in the next few years, and at some point, someone else will probably play Wolverine. For now, though, Jackman and Mangold have done something nearly as impressive as exploring the same character over an extended period: They've put a period at the end of a 17-year sentence.

]]> Fri, 03 Mar 2017 05:55:02 -0500