"Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"

 ☆☆ 

If you make it to the very, very end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, you'll get to hear a wonderful new version of the still-wonderful, majestic John Williams theme from the original Jurassic Park.

Also, the visual effects in this film are undeniably excellent. They are very impressive.

Also, there is one fantastic shot of a dinosaur perched upon the roof of a Gothic mansion while a full moon emerges from behind storm clouds, which is probably the image that director J.A. Bayona hoped would most define his film. It's wrong to ascribe intent to a filmmaker unless he or she has made their intentions clear, but in this case I have to believe this mash-up of Jurassic Park and old Universal horror films like The Wolfman and Frankenstein is what Bayona was going for, because if it's not then I can't for the life of me figure out anything about the clumsily titled Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

The problem is, the Universal-monsters-meets-dinosaurs bit doesn't work at all. I mean, at all. What is intended to be scary comes across as silly, what is meant as malevolent comes across as dumb, and what is meant to be thrilling comes across as overblown. Dinosaurs creeping through an old dark house might have been entertaining and exciting, but by the time we get there Bayona and co-screenwriter Colin Trevorrow have filled their movie with far, far too much extraneous material.

For instance, there's the reason the dinosaurs are in the old dark house in the first place: They're being sold at auction to an assemblage of high-priced warlords from around the world. The reason they're being sold at auction is that there is a new character named Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), an old man who, it turns out, was the never-before-mentioned partner of kindly billionaire John Hammond, who built the original Jurassic Park. Lockwood has a nefarious (is there any other kind) aide-de-camp who has been working toward pulling a handful of dinosaurs off of Isla Nublar, the island where humans keep building Jurassic theme parks and dinosaurs keep eating people.

Now, a volcano on Isla Nublar is about to blow up, and all the dinosaurs will die, which some people think is what should happen (they include Jeff Goldblum's chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, who appears for about three minutes in this movie to bookend the film with a laughably bad monologue). Because this is a movie taking place in a post-Trump world, there is also some ham-fisted discussion of God's will and science vs. religion, which is presented, of course, by politicians. And since dinosaurs (and Jurassic World) have become politicized, that leads to a save-the-dinosaurs group headed up by Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and some twenty-something hipsters.

Summoned to Lockwood's Northern California estate by his sinister aide Eli (Rafe Spall) and eerie housekeeper (Geraldine Chaplin, in a pointless extended cameo), Claire comes to believe that Lockwood is trying to get the dinosaurs off the exploding island so they can be saved.

Cue the mustache twirling ... for it turns out that Eli is in cahoots with an arms-dealer-slash-animal-trafficker who is able to pull together all the world's baddest, richest people with about 25 minutes' notice to have a big auction.

In the meantime, Claire manages to recruit dinosaur handler Owen (Chris Pratt) from his semi-retirement after the traumatic events of the last Jurassic World movie, and they head back to the island because Owen is the only one who can coax the velociraptor named Blue out of her hiding place.

Got that so far?

If you're sensing it's too much story, it is. But it's also told with leaps of logic that make absolutely no sense. One moment, we're told Blue is the key to creating a new kind of weaponized dinosaur, but minutes later that new creature is already fully grown, caged up and ready to be auctioned off to the highest bidder in a grand chamber underneath the Lockwood mansion.

That auction happens within days of getting the dinosaurs off Isla Nublar. Following an extended action scene in which Claire and one of her dinosaur activist friends have to hold their breath under water for what seems like six or seven minutes, Claire and Owen (and the hipster kids) make it onto the boat that's leaving Isla Nublar, which is 120 miles off the coast of Costa Rica.

Now, last I looked (which was about two minutes ago), Costa Rica is something like 3,000 nautical miles from Northern California, and a cargo ship racing at 22 knots could make it there in, oh, about a week. But somehow the trip in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom takes about a day, during which time the now-evil dinosaur geneticist (BD Wong) manages, apparently, to create a whole new species of dinosaur.

Everything about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom doesn't just strain credulity, it pushes, pushes, pushes at the borders of believability and then smashes right through with results that take the Jurassic World series into a direction that defies everything we've ever been told about the dinosaurs in these films. In the end (mild spoiler alert, if you're worried) some of the dinosaurs fall into the hands of war-mongerers from Russia and Indonesia, while others escape into the forests of Northern California and, in record time, make it to the suburbs of Los Angeles and even to Las Vegas.

But, hold on a second, weren't there really specific rules in the original films about how the dinosaurs were created so they would never be able to escape?  Do those contingency plans take hold? How is it that the world's news services are reporting 24 hours a day on the Isla Nublar "crisis," yet none are flying over the island when it finally blows up? Wouldn't they have noticed that a huge cargo ship is "kidnapping" some of the dinosaurs?  And when they arrive in California, wouldn't there be a little more, um, I dunno, awareness of dozens of massive trucks moving dinosaurs up the 101 freeway?

And what about that auction? How is it that the world's richest black-market villains know exactly what they'd do to incorporate dinosaurs into military plans? Wouldn't that require some sort of planning?

Then there's the bizarre revelation about Lockwood and his own DNA experimentations?  There's one plot twist that comes flying in from nowhere, and even the actors look confused about its sudden appearance, which is never discussed again.

This may all seem like carping for no good reason, but 25 years ago, the original Jurassic Park took all of its loopholes quite seriously, offering up science fiction that may have been outlandish but seemed, within the context of the movie, to be solid. No, we can't create dinosaurs, but if we could, Jurassic Park told us what might happen.

Now comes Jurassic World, which throws all that maybe-it-could-happen science out the window for some cheap political jabs, non-sensical plot holes, ludicrous plot twists, and a setting that neither makes any sense nor is exploited to its fullest possible effect.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is almost aggressively stupid, and borders on insulting to its audience, who has stuck with the Jurassic Park movies for a long time for one key reason: The first Steven Spielberg-directed film was a marvelous creation, so potent it built up good will that lasted through two pointless sequels and a reboot that managed to be both brainless and satisfying.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is only one of those things.

But it does have that music -- at least at the end.




Viewed June 23, 2018 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5

1715

"Book Club"

 ☆☆ 

Here is a set of easy-to-follow instructions for anyone who is thinking about seeing Book Club:

1) Turn on your TV
2) Navigate to the search feature of your service provider
3) Type in the words "The Golden Girls"
4) Find any episode of that series, which ran from 1985 to 1992
5) Press play

Book Club is, by and large, a big-screen adaptation of that much-loved TV series, only without its wit, intelligence and charm. Instead of four mature women sharing a home in Florida, Book Club offers four mature women sharing a living room for a few hours once a month, where they drink wine at an alarming, borderline-alcoholic rate and talk about anything other than the book they've been reading.

The book club in the title is merely a plot device that brings together a tough-as-nails businesswoman (Jane Fonda), a wisecracking judge (Candice Bergen), a sexually frustrated housewife (Mary Steenburgen), and a slightly daffy widow (Diane Keaton). Allegedly they've been doing this once a month for 30 years, but there's little sense these characters know each other; these actresses, who together have more than a dozen Oscars or nominations between them, seem barely interested in the film. Their performances, like the movie itself, are flat and monotone, disconnected from reality.

After Jane Fonda's character proposes they read Fifty Shades of Gray, which is the cleverest idea in the movie (and it's not all that clever), the four women go their separate ways and the movie tells their individual stories, occasionally bringing them together to comment on what they've been doing. But it's a flimsy excuse for an even flimsier plot, a story without any purpose at all except to let these once-great actresses occasionally make a wisecrack, talk about sex, or do something that is intended to make us guffaw at how inept they are living in the world around them.

There's a sort of sadness to Book Club, when you think about it: None of the women seems capable of living a fulfilling life, even though they're in their 60s, 70s and 80s; they haven't figured out what makes them happy, or how they can find satisfaction in any way that doesn't involve having a man in her life.

The situations they're put in all have to do with men. Diane Keaton's ditzy la-di-da character, the kind she's been playing for 40 years, has a painfully awkward "meet-cute" with a man on a plane (Andy Garcia); he turns out to be a pilot and she falls for him and spends time at his sprawling ranch while her daughters worry she's so old that she's going to trip and fall and hurt herself.

Jane Fonda's no-nonsense hotel owner is completely in control of her life, except that the guy (Don Johnson) she dumped 40 years ago before they got married is still following her around, and Fonda is flummoxed by all the attention he's lavishing on her.

Mary Steenburgen is married to Craig T. Nelson, who doesn't have sex with her anymore, so she goes to embarrassing lengths to find ways to arouse him, and their whole story is about unused penises and vaginas, because this is a movie in which the words "penis" and "vagina" can be uttered without feeling infantile, except that every time one of those words is mentioned it sounds infantile.

Candice Bergen is the judge, and she has let her body go because she doesn't have a man, and spends all day, whether in her chambers or at home, sorting through dating sites and going on random dates with men played in single-scene cameo appearances by Richard Dreyfuss and Wallace Shawn.

This almost completely charmless film flits back and forth between the four individual stories, but there's no connecting fiber, no sense that these people know and care about each other for any reason other than that the script requires it. This isn't like "The Golden Girls" or the Jane Fonda-Lily Tomlin series "Grace and Frankie," where you get the feeling that these people really are friends who know what makes the other tick. In this movie, they're just stereotypes that keep running into each other now and then and having giggly talks about sex like they're doing a junior-high sleepover.

Did someone think Book Club was saying something meaningful about aging or romance or feminism? Did they think Book Club would help illuminate some aspect of the lives of people over 60? I have to imagine they thought they did, because they couldn't have thought it was funny.

That's not to say there aren't a few laughs in the movie -- the best moment is when Mary Steenburgen reveals how infrequently she and her husband have sex; the line about rabbits and Benadryl almost makes up for the rest of the movie. Almost.

But the way it's written, the way its acted and mostly the way its shot -- like a TV commercial for a blood-pressure medicine, or an HGTV series about decorating a house to look like a model home -- infuse it with a bland mediocrity. There's just nothing appealing about these women or their alleged predicaments: In the 21st century, couldn't there be a crisis faced by an older woman that doesn't involve finding a suitable man?

There are so few films, especially during the summer season, made for an adult audience that I want to praise Book Club at least on that level, but it's such a dull and lifeless film that it's impossible to do that; it's few good jokes aren't on their own worth the price of admission.

For incisive thoughts on aging and the difficulty of late-in-life romance, save yourself some money and watch a few episodes of "The Golden Girls." You'll gain way more insight into the issues faced by older women who are still active, vibrant and interesting, you'll get better storytelling, and you'll have way more fun.

Book Club can't even rise to the level of a bar that was set three decades ago. It's a painfully dull film, a series of vignettes that never lead anywhere, never explore the inner lives of its characters, and offers almost no insight into the struggles a 70-year-old woman faces in today's youth-obsessed world. All of that would be okay if only Book Club were funny.

But Book Club isn't funny. It's not, in the end, much of anything at all, except a reminder that there is no compelling reason ever to read Fifty Shades of Gray.



Viewed June 15, 2018 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5

2020

"Alex Strangelove"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Turns out John Hughes only made it look easy. Movies like Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink seem to follow a basic formula, but maybe it's one that only Hughes himself could concoct. Earlier this year, the sweet-but-bland Love Simon tried to emulate Hughes, and now comes Alex Strangelove, which goes so far as to call out Hughes' films by name.

Alex Strangelove comes much closer than Love Simon to getting it right, but there's something about the tone and pacing of this film -- which is playing in a few theaters while simultaneously debuting on Netflix -- that feels off, like a recipe that's tasty enough but hasn't been put together quite right.

Daniel Doheny plays high school student Alex Truelove, an overachieving, slightly neurotic geek who starts dating the new kid at school, Claire (her name's a direct reference to The Breakfast Club), played by Madeline Weinstein. In a gender role-reversal that probably never would have crossed Hughes' mind, Claire is putting pressure on Alex to have sex with her, and he's convinced himself that he really, really wants to -- so much so, he recruits his friend Dell (Daniel Zolghadri, the funniest thing about the film) to help him get a hotel room in Nyack, NY, where he and Claire can get it on.

There's a problem, though: Alex isn't all that interested in sex with Claire, and a good part of his anxiety comes from his attraction to Elliott (Antonio Marziale), an open, unashamed boy who graduated from high school a year ago and got thrown out of the house for being gay.

Alex spends most of the film worrying about having sex, and when he and Claire finally do the deed, the result only creates more uncertainty for Alex, who is having a hard time denying is attraction to Elliott.

Alex Strangelove has sex on the brain, which isn't a problem -- it's refreshing to see a film so unconcerned about upholding societal norms on what's acceptable for teenagers, and instead allows them to do things teenagers do. Experimenting with sex and coming out as gay are treated with impressive non-chalance: the movie is about sex, but in the context of making it seem like a normal, healthy part of growing up.

Maybe a little more troubling is the film's open attitude toward drugs and drinking; it makes a joke of both, and after a while these kids come across as borderline delinquents. There's a lot of drinking and drug use in Alex Strangelove, to the point that it's distracting. But, hey, I think back to being 17 and suppose that's having sex and getting drunk were on our minds back then, and it's something of a relief to know that in an era of trigger warnings and school shootings that some things don't change too much.

Daniel Doheny and Madeline Weinstein are cute together and have a believable chemistry, and Antionio Marziale has a curiously underwritten role as the chief rival love interest, as if writer director Craig Johnson (who made the woefully underrated The Skeleton Twins) struggled with making Alex-Claire or Alex-Elliott the most important relationship in the movie.

Alex Strangelove also suffers from abrupt tonal shifts that don't quite work: Claire's mother is sick with cancer, but her condition is merely a plot device and doesn't have emotional resonance; Elliott's tale of being kicked out of the house and moving in with a friend never goes anywhere; and there's a weird (and funny) strand of plot involving a hallucinogenic frog that one of Alex's friends buys on the dark web.

There's too much happening, and what might have seemed mildly zany in Hughes' hands (think of all the plot threads in Sixteen Candles) overwhelms Alex Strangelove.  It never quite settles on one approach, and the climactic prom dance feels underdone, as if by that time everyone involved with the film just wanted it to come to an end. What should feel like an emotional catharsis is instead merely sweet.

The movie ends with dozens of real-life video confessionals from high-school kids who have come out and are sharing their story, which is nice, but it would have been nicer if Alex himself had taken more of an emotional journey, had come to some realizations about himself and the way he loves.

Despite those criticisms, Alex Strangelove is worth seeing by people of all sexual orientations and by parents who won't get too alarmed by the casual ways it depicts sex, drugs and alcohol. It's got a more complex view of high schoolers than most comedies, and as a gay movie, it does something important: It takes Alex's attraction to Elliott mostly at face value, without getting preachy or solemn (something Love Simon had a hard time doing) -- when Alex finally tells Claire that he might be in love with someone else, it's the someone else that breaks her heart a bit, not the fact that the someone is a boy.

To that end, Alex Strangelove is progress, and a charming (if awkward) reminder during Gay Pride month that if we really want to see LGBTQ people depicted fairly on screen, we've got to move past being gay and toward being human. Despite its shortcomings, that's something Alex Strangelove accomplishes well.




Viewed June 9, 2018 -- Netflix

"Upgrade"

 ☆☆☆½ 

There are two things you need to know about Upgrade if you are thinking about seeing it: 1) it is an exceedingly bloody movie, with graphic violence that would be shocking if it weren't so silly; and 2) one of the characters is a mad scientist who lives alone in an underground lair, where he performs experiments.

The two points actually relate to each other, because the most important thing to know about Upgrade is that it is in no way meant to be taken seriously -- its more of a comic book than any of the Marvel or DC movies, and because of that it comes with a lighthearted freedom despite its revenge-filled, blood-soaked tale.

Logan Marshall-Green, who looks exactly like Tom Hardy, stars as man with the impossibly made-for-action-hero-status name Gray Trace. He and his stunning, ultra-successful wife live somewhere in a not-too-distant future that is filled with self-driving cars, voice-activated homes, and ubiquitous police drones. Gray Trace does not fit in to this world, and he prefers to work on old cars while his wife brings home lots and lots of money from her job at a tech company.

He's working on a car to deliver to an eccentric beachside inventor, and his wife comes along for the drive. They find the inventor/mad scientist (Harrison Gilbertson, itself an excellent name for a mad scientist), who shows them what he's been working on: an implantable computer chip that could control ... well, everything.

No sooner are they back on the road when the electronic car takes the handsome Trace couple into the bad part of town, where a group of thugs attacks them in a particularly brutal way, killing the wife (Melanie Vallejo) and leaving Gray for dead. He barely recovers, when when he's done, he's quadriplegic.

Cue the mad scientist, who promises Gray complete recovery if he can implant his chip in Gray's spine. Gray accepts (after signing a non-disclosure agreement) and within days -- hours, really, he's moving again with one big side effect: The computer chip, named STEM, talks to him in a voice that sounds rather suspiciously like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Together, STEM and Gray seek out the men who killed the beautiful Mrs. Trace, uncovering a massive conspiracy to take over the world while being pursued by a gruff-but-nice cop (Betty Gabriel).

Part of the fun to be found in Upgrade -- and there is a lot of fun, if you can (ironically) shut off your brain -- is in its intense familiarity. The plot is a mix of Robocop and The Terminator, with maybe a few drops of Escape from New York thrown in for flavor. It's all thoroughly preposterous, ridiculously violent, and undeniable fun.

If it's not quite as good as those earlier films, it certainly is of a piece with them, and Upgrade's director, Leigh Wannell (who wrote a number of the Saw movies) must have seen them dozens of times to get the tone mostly right: Upgrade is, at times, notably grimmer and less jokey than those movies, though it thankfully understands its own ridiculous setup and embraces it.

You might say, Upgrade is the best 1980s action-thriller not made in the 1980s.  Back then, "Dollar Tuesdays" made audiences uncritical and open to embrace low-budget action movies like The Terminator. Now we've got Moviepass, which does the same thing for audiences in the 21st century, and if they go see Upgrade they'll find they get their money's worth ... and a whole lot more.




Viewed June 9, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5

1350

"Hereditary"

 ☆☆ 

Among the sights to behold in Hereditary are a decapitated head covered with swarming ants, a child using scissors to snip off the head of a dead bird, and a woman sawing off her own head with wire or maybe dental floss. When you're watching a floating, possessed woman sawing off her own head, it's hard to take notice of details like what she's using to do it.

This is a whacko film, a movie that is destined to divide audiences -- or maybe unite them in their Trump-era distaste for the highbrow critics on Rotten Tomatoes, where Hereditary has a near-perfect Top Critics score of 98 percent, an almost-unanimous consensus that I'm wagering audiences won't share, thanks to its off-the-charts weirdness that would be endearing if only the movie weren't so overstuffed with a convoluted plot.

It's so unexpectedly weird that near the end of the movie, the character played by Toni Collette all but stops the film cold as she tries to explain everything that the film has been unable to make clear. Wild-eyed and more than half-crazed, she tries to bundle up all of the film's loose ends and make sense of them, but it's to little avail, I'm afraid: When I saw Hereditary, half of the audience was holding back snickers, while a few brave folks ventured loud guffaws. Then again, the twenty-somethings on my way out were already on the phone, telling friends, "I just saw the scariest movie ever." So, make of that what you will.

As borderline insane as Hereditary is, it is either smart enough or not brave enough to go really over the edge the way Darren Aronofsky did in last year's unhinged mother!, though toward the end it comes close. At its best, Hereditary is harrowing and even gripping, and at its worst, which is basically the last half of the film, it's sometimes howlingly terrible.

It gets off to a fantastic start: A newspaper obituary introduces a dead matriarch, and in short order we meet her grieving, not-exactly loving daughter Annie (Collette). Annie's marriage seems to be crumbling and whose children are having a hard time coping with what we gather has been a less-than-idyllic family life. They live in a rambling, perpetually underlit house out in the country, where Annie hand crafts creepy and disturbing miniature dioramas of her psychologically fraught family life.

Annie's husband (played by Gabriel Byrne) mostly leaves her alone, as do her son Peter (Alex Wolff) and seemingly sickly daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). While Annie tries to make sense of her mother's death and the uncomfortable relationship they had, Peter and Charlie take off one evening -- and only one of them comes back.

The family descends further into crisis, and at this point, it looks as if Hereditary might base its horror on the genuine terrors of a dysfunctional family.  As Annie cracks up and the family unit falls apart, Hereditary is on track to doing for intense grief what The Babadook did for depression or It Follows did for sexually transmitted diseases: to become a freakish and unsettling metaphor for a deeper emotional trauma.

But that's not what happens. Instead, Hereditary makes a sharp turn into something far crazier and far less interesting, and while I won't spoil exactly what that is here, I'll say that the movie's plot bears more than a little resemblance to the original Wicker Man and, most especially, to Rosemary's Baby.

That would be fine, but the two parts of the film never connect, and the film's big revelation is curiously uninteresting, if only because the movie's first half is so strong. It's quiet and confident, bearing a lot of similarity to The Sixth Sense, which also starred Collette (whose Oscar buzz seems, truth be told, more connected to her credit on this film as an executive producer than to her actual performance, which whiplashes between intelligent anguish and crazed screaming). There's nowhere the film could possibly go that wouldn't be fulfilling -- except where it does go, which is into a place so mismatched with where it started, that Hereditary falters and becomes eye-rollingly silly rather than shocking.

Ann Dowd, so good as Aunt Lydia in TV's "The Handmaid's Tale," comes into the film relatively late, and is asked to take on essentially the same character Ruth Gordon played in Rosemary's Baby, but there's something faltering about writer-director Ari Aster's take on things: both Dowd's pivotal character and the story as a whole lack the paranoid claustrophobia of the movie that serves as its inspiration (not to mention Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and M. Night Shyamalan's films).

What should be nightmarish is too often mostly silly, and also inexplicable: If you do see Hereditary, you'll probably wind up, like I did, going online afterward to figure out if others have deciphered the thing. Spoiler: They have, and those breathless write-ups ("the summer's scariest movie!" blares one) are vastly more entertaining than the movie itself.

But if you do wind up going to see it, do me a favor: Let me know what it is I missed in Hereditary, because I sense I missed a lot. Except the woman cutting off her own head. That I didn't miss. I just wish I had.




Viewed June 8, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

2000