"The Endless"

 ☆☆½ 

Only after seeing The Endless did I learn that it is part of the bewildering and off-putting trend of movie "cinematic universes," in which characters and settings can't simply be taken for what they are but are connected to other movies that used similar characters and settings.

Coincidentally, The Endless was, when I saw it, accompanied by a trailer for a new movie from the Harry Potter "Wizarding World," a film with the unfortunate and clunky title Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald, a title that I guess makes sense to those who have seen the other movies and read the books and spent time on the websites and are willing to forgive narrative clarity for the sake of feeling like a member of a not-very-private club: The secret handshakes mean that outsiders can never really feel like they belong.

Harry Potter is doing it, the Marvel movies do it, James Bond did it before (and much better than any of the current crop), DC does it, Star Wars does it, and all that is well and good, but now it's affecting the indie film world, too, and a moviegoer that's even more perplexing.  The arthouse seems, at least to me, like one place that should be "universe averse," but here is The Endless to create a sort of Hipster Universe.

And when it comes to The Endless, the filmmakers would no doubt prefer referring to their cinematic universe as a "mythology" -- they even reference H.P. Lovecraft (a world-builder if ever there was one) before the film even begins.  Even if you don't know, as I didn't, that this film is tied to an earlier film by the same filmmakers called Resolution, there's a very clear sense throughout the film that we're missing important pieces of the story puzzle, which can be found in the earlier film and another movie called Spring.

The filmmakers who made these movies are Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. In The Endless, they play brothers named Aaron and Justin, which is either clever or tremendously lazy, it's hard to know which.  Aaron and Justin live a fringe existence in L.A., where they came when they escaped from what they like to call a "UFO death cult" in the dry and rocky mountains east of San Diego.

Justin (played by Justin) is grateful they are out on their own and takes part in regular deprogramming therapy sessions.  Aaron (played by Aaron) has more complex feelings about the place they grew up, and when a mysterious videotape containing footage of one of the cult's members arrives in the mail, Aaron awkwardly talks Justin into heading back to "Camp Arcadia" just for the day. It's an emotionally illogical way to shift the action into the camp, where some very weird stuff is happening.

Once they get there, The Endless vacillates between intriguing sci-fi-tinged drama and some exposition paced so slowly that for a while the film's title seems worryingly accurate.  As they spend time at the camp, first the promised 24 hours, then longer and longer, it is clear that something is very off about the place, and when the camera spins around at one point to reveal two moons in the sky, The Endless perks up.

But it can't quite sustain the eerie drama and disquieting mood, which in part seems to be a problem of having too much "world-building" mythology taking place and not enough honest storytelling.  There are lots of hints of TV's Lost and Westworld in the way it's put together, not to mention Richard Kelly's still-trippy Donnie Darko and Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, but The Endless really struggles with keeping it all cohesive and coherent.

There are some really unsettling moments, and some hints at a really exciting supernatural story, but The Endless can't quite tie it all together; the "reveal" of where they are and what's going on just opens up more doors that never close behind the filmmakers. As storytellers, Moorhead and Benson seem far too interested in setting up the scenarios than seeing them through, and the lack of follow through -- which doomed Lost in its final season -- is largely what bedevils The Endless.

Despite some great imagery and some really fine moments, The Endless can't quite bring it all together, which is a little bit of an irony considering the film's obsession with endless loops.  It builds and builds and builds to a climax that is both under- and overwhelming, and that never explains some of the ideas and key moments are the most key.

A little more focus on this story and a little less satisfaction with connecting The Endless with the filmmakers' other movies (which I haven't seen) would likely have served it well, and brought the film some much-needed tension just at the critical moments when it goes slack.

Fans of hardcore sci-fi-laced fantasy might find much to admire in The Endless, but those of us who go to movies to be entertained and transported, not to solve inscrutable puzzles, will likely just be at first frustrated and then possibly bored -- which is not at all the kinds of emotions you'd expect from a movie about survivors of a UFO death cult.




Viewed April 22, 2018 -- 1415

AMC Sunset 5

"Blockers"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Stop me if this sounds familiar: suburban Chicago (the affluent part), high school, humiliated kids, clueless parents. Blockers is firmly in John Hughes territory, and it aims to both tear down the same stereotypes Hughes mocked -- and upheld -- three decades ago, while affirming just how much some things about the high-school experience are never, ever going to change.

The unexpected thing about Blockers, though, is how it's not so much about the three high-school seniors who are ostensibly at its core, but about their parents. Maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise,  given how much Blockers is in the spirit of both Hughes and early Judd Apatow comedies. The youthful heroes of those movies were always going to grow up, and Blockers is the movie that springs naturally from their anxieties and fears.

It wouldn't be too hard, really, to imagine that Lisa, Mitchell and Hunter, the 40-something parents whose neuroses fuel Blockers, as the Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall characters from The Breakfast Club all grown up and with kids of their own. Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz, who play the parents, bear more than a passing resemblance, and maybe this is what happens to a generation that imagined themselves to be more liberal, more open-minded than their own parents: They grow up to be just as uptight and worried as the people who raised them.

Of course, they don't imagine themselves that way. They all think they're the cool parents, though their daughters would certainly disagree. Julie is the "pretty one," an only child whose mother dotes on her; Kayla is the sporty one, whose father bonds with her over athletics and whose mom takes a hands-off attitude; Sam is the shy, quiet one, embarrassed by both her self-absorbed mother and absent father.

Blockers takes place on their prom night, and the movie wastes precious little time setting up the characters and their predicaments: One of the best things about the movie is how it jumps right in and lets the characters find and form themselves over time.

There's rather a lot on the mind of Blockers -- the trouble parents have letting go, the perils teens have finding their own way, the pressures that are put on them to use sex (and drugs and alcohol) as ways of fitting in. All of that is there, and all of it is explored by director Kay Cannon in unexpected depth, but more than anything Blockers wants to make you laugh, and it does -- a lot, and consistently.

The humor in Blockers is bawdy, naughty and sometimes downright raunchy, but it almost never feels gratuitous, not even when one character consumes beer in a most unexpected way, another winds up inches away from a middle-aged penis, and another ends up in bed with a drug addict.

Put in those terms, Blockers seems, well, inappropriate at best and straining for laughs at worst, and yet it's neither; it's weirdly sweet, and it's always working hard for some pretty big laughs.  The adult actors -- Mann, Cena and Barinholtz -- work spectacularly well together, and the movie hits the pause button on the crude stuff just long enough for a serious reality check: This is a movie about high schoolers having sex, made in the era of #MeToo and at a time when there's some really interesting reflection going on about those indispensable-but-sometimes-questionable Hughes films.  (If you haven't read it, this essay by Molly Ringwald is fascinating, and seems perfectly timed for the release of Blockers.) A scene in which one of the girls' moms (played by Sarayu Blue) questions the sanity of the other adults is just about perfect, and keeps the laughs coming.

What the parents are trying to do, by the way, is stop their kids from having sex, a premise that could, and maybe should, come across as lurid but seems eminently reasonable given the way these people have approached the rearing of their children in the first place.

For most of the film, the kids have no idea what their parents are up to, and the only time the movie loses just a little bit of its momentum is when everyone figures it out.

The rest of the time, Blockers is most noteworthy less for its wacky concept than for the way it treats all three of the girls with immense respect, as wholly formed people who have their own specific perspectives and foibles.  The actresses who play them, Kathryn Newton (Julie), Geraldine Viswanathan (Kayla) and Gideon Adlon (Sam), have created three wonderfully realized characters.  They could be front and center in their own movie, and this is a rare film that warrants a sequel: It would be fun to see how the three of them fare after the credits roll.

But as much as Blockers proudly shows off three young women who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, it's mostly about the parents who are struggling to see their daughters grow up. The lengths they'll go to in order to prevent time from moving forward, to stop the world from changing, are a little ridiculous, sometimes outrageous -- the way all of us act when we realize time is passing right by us.

Those kids are going to grow up, whether we're ready or not, which is exactly what they've always done.




Viewed April 7, 2018 -- Laemmle Noho

1650

"A Quiet Place"

 ☆☆☆½ 

So much of A Quiet Place is so right, so tense and tremendously well-crafted, that it's not until after the perfect last shot that you start thinking ... and wondering ... and scratching your head.

That's what happened with the audience that had moments ago been shrieking with glee; on the way out, you heard people wondering, "But ... ," and "If ... ," and "So ... ," and none of that harms the movie at all during its spare and taut running time, but drains it of some of its post-viewing potency.

Parts of A Quiet Place bear resemblance to other films and TV shows, especially the Alien movies and "Lost," but it takes a while for A Quiet Place to fall into the realm of familiarity.  It's the setup, which feels both fresh and expertly told, that really hooks us:

A family scrounges for supplies in a town that appears to have been ravaged during an apocalyptic event, and they're being very quiet about it.  Something is forcing their silence, something much more sinister and dire than the fact that the teenage daughter is deaf.  There's something desperate about the way the mother communicates with her kids through sign language, about the way the pre-teen son  keeps so quiet, and the father insists that his youngest child put down a toy, telling him, "It's too loud."

This long, unspeakably tense prologue ends in a tragedy that drives the most human of emotions that are on display throughout the rest of the film, and sets up a core conflict between two of the characters that offers some surprising emotional depth to the movie.

It's also visually a stunner, and that may be the biggest surprise of the film -- that its lead actor, John Krasinski, is also the director, and that he has a magnificent visual style and a bold storytelling ability.   Starring with his real-life wife Emily Blunt, along with tremendous supporting work by Millicent Simmonds as their deaf daughter and Noah Jupe as their skittish son, Krasinski makes the first part of the film work best.

There's almost no dialogue, the story reveals itself in inventive ways, and we come to realize that what's going on involves monsters from outer space.  It's almost a little bit of a letdown to discover that the movie is going to take its alien-invasion concept so literally; the setup is so spectacular that it's hard to imagine it having a fulfilling payoff.

But it does, mostly -- especially as the movie separates its main characters in order place them all in maximum peril.  And throughout, A Quiet Place dazzles by focusing on its novel conceit: That the aliens attack people based on sound, and that everyone, at all times, must be very, very, very quiet.

This works wonderfully, except, alas, when it doesn't, and perhaps its a testament to Krasinski as a director and a screenwriter (he wrote the script with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) that the enormous effort to close some of the plot holes doesn't feel as obvious as it is.  But the primary problem is that A Quiet Place can't close them all, and eventually logic wiggles its way into the back of your head while you watch the movie: Doesn't that make a noise?  How come the scary monsters can hear that and not that?  And why, for Pete's sake, would any reasonable husband and wife decide it's a good idea to bring a crying, screaming, noisy baby into a world that demands silence?

Though the movie runs only 90 minutes, for about 15 or 20 precious minutes those huge plot holes threaten to overwhelm the movie, and might succeed if everything didn't pivot to a numbingly tense scene in a grain silo that triggers a real whopper of an ending, all of it leading up to a final moment that has to rank as one of the most satisfying of any horror film.

A Quiet Place is a squealing, squirming, fist-clenching delight, as long as you keep reminding your brain -- which may start nagging you about some of the things you're seeing -- of the only rule in the film that matters: "Just shut up."




Viewed April 6, 2018 -- Arclight Sherman Oaks

2015