"Hotel Mumbai"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

There are times when Hotel Mumbai is almost too excruciating to watch, and others when it seems uncomfortably to be playing a horrifying real-life terrorist attack for entertainment. There's a fine line between dramatization and exploitation and Hotel Mumbai stays on the right side of the line ... barely.

Director Anthony Maras makes his feature film debut with this film, and he's a director to watch: Hotel Mumbai generates genuine suspense despite a pre-ordained outcome; is filled with actors who manage to deliver real and jolting performances; and always keeps its audience riveted. The latter is a considerable achievement because Hotel Mumbai is harrowing, brutal and almost sadistically intense.

Maras and co-writer John Collee sometimes bring just a hair too much '70s disaster movie tone to Hotel Mumbai, particularly in the introductory scenes, when we meet characters like the earnest young steward (Dev Patel), the wealthy Americans (Armie Hammer, Nazanin Bodiadi), the dedicated chef (Anupam Kher), and the sleazy Russian (Jason Isaacs). Still, the approach does find important humanity amid the horror, as they all are inside Mumbai's Taj Hotel on Nov. 26, 2008, when a group of terrorists lay brutal siege to the landmark and to the city.

Hotel Mumbai is not a movie to watch as much as it is a movie to witness. If it feels too much to bear at times, that speaks to the creative achievement of its filmmakers -- and, perhaps, to the unfathomable brutality of the times in which we live.



Viewed March 31, 2019 -- AMC Sunset 5

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Catching Up: "Wildlife"

 ☆☆☆☆☆ 

From now on, when anyone asks what movie I think should have won Best Picture instead of Green Book, here is my answer: Wildlife, a movie that came and went from theaters in a couple of weeks, was overlooked in every major awards show, and that might be the best movie of 2018.

It's the directorial debut of actor Paul Dano, which he wrote with his partner, actress Zoe Kazan. To recite the narrative of Wildlife, which is based on a novel by Richard Ford, might make it seem trite and mundane, but I assure you it is anything but those things.  Wildlife is told through the eyes of 14-year-old Joe (Ed Oxenbould, who is wise and wonderful), who watches, with both alarm and helplessness, his parents fall away from each other.

It's set in 1960, when men and women knew exactly what was expected of them. The trouble for Joe's family is that his father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), and his mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) don't want to live up to those expectations. Constantly jobless Jerry takes a job fighting a massive wildfire. While he's gone, normally stoic Jeanette has a breakdown -- or maybe it's an epiphany.

Mulligan's portrait of a woman losing herself is harrowing and filled with beautiful empathy. It's a luminous performance in a film that calmly, intimately observes the complicated, contradictory, awful, beautiful, confusing way people are, and the despair -- not to mention the hope -- that all that messiness can leave behind.



Viewed March 27, 2019 -- Amazon Prime

"Us"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

It's right there dual meanings of the title. And in the answer that the evil twin of Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) gives when her victim insists on knowing who is attacking her: "We're Americans."

The deeper meaning in Jordan Peele's second feature -- a wildly ambitious and sometimes frustratingly (almost joyously) disjointed socio-political metaphor -- is hidden within a gorgeous but frequently confusing and always convoluted puzzle. Its coyness, along with sometimes murky social commentary, may make Us frustrating for some. It tries very hard to be both scary and meaningful. Maybe a little too hard. Then again, so many movies don't try anything at all.

Peele imbues Us with an atmosphere of dread from its first moments. Nyong'o's Adelaide is first seen in 1986, when she wanders away from her parents at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. The year -- and a nearly forgotten event it contained -- is important. Three decades later, Adelaide returns with her family to a nearby vacation house, where they're viciously and senselessly attacked by people who look exactly like them. Except it's not so senseless.

Horror movies have long traded in metaphors: the loss of identity in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; the terror of illness in The Fly. Peele's metaphors are sometimes obtuse, and the movie poses maybe one or two too many questions whose answers it expects us to find ourselves. But the joy of Us is how it leaves us actually wanting to make the effort to do just that.



Viewed March 21, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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"Giant Little Ones"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Less than a generation ago, all but the most fearless of gay high-school students were expected to keep their sexual orientation hidden. Just 30 years after John Hughes’ spate of high-school movies it is, to paraphrase one character in Giant Little Ones says, more acceptable to discuss and experiment with sexual orientation than ever before.

Except, well, it isn't. High schoolers are always high schoolers. Boys will be boys.  Frankie (Josh Wiggins) and Ballas (Darren Mann) are longtime friends, both with girlfriends, both on the swim team.

After a boisterous high-school party, Ballas ends up in Frankie's bed for a sexual encounter.  They never speak of it, and in fact Frankie starts making moves on Ballas's confused, wounded sister (Taylor Hickson). The boys' once-easy and happy friendship begins to shatter amid Ballas's hyper-masculinity.

Giant Little Ones offers an insightful, sometimes dramatically confusing, view of sexuality, never forcing its characters into easy corners. Despite a couple of violent outbursts, it's a mostly genteel film that looks at its upper-class characters through sympathetic eyes. It's never messy or raw -- unpredictable attributes that could have brought a lot to the film.

As an exploration of the confusion and sheer panic of high-school sexuality (and attendant harassment and bullying), Giant Little Ones is worth seeing. Kyle MacLachlan as Josh's late-in-life-gay dad brings real emotional heft. The filmmakers seem to be trying for a Call Me By Your Name style sucker-punch with the dad's big speech, but nothing about Giant Little Ones is a sucker punch ... more a gentle pat on the back serving to remind of the difficulty of finding yourself while coming out.



Viewed March 10, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5

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"Captain Marvel"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Just a few months after the brilliant, captivating, splendid, altogether wonderful Spider-Man: Into the Universe showed us that all Marvel movies don't need to look alike, here comes Captain Marvel to remind us that just because they don't have to doesn't mean they won't. Captain Marvel looks, feels and behaves so much like other Marvel movies that when two of the films come together in an end-credits sequence, there's absolutely no stylistic clash. If nothing else, these movies are impressive in their sameness.

Still, there's always some room for customization, and after an elaborate, effects-laden, alien-world opening, the title character in Captain Marvel winds up on Earth in the mid-1990s, and for about 45 minutes it's all breezy, easy fun.  Aside from the endlessly distracting "de-aging" done to actors Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg, Captain Marvel offers more than most Marvel films to recommend it in its amusing, lovingly maintained '90s vibe and period touches. Leave it to Marvel to make the 1990s into a "period piece."

The Earth-bound scenes are the best part of the movie, and for a long time make Captain Marvel the most enjoyable of the Marvel films. It finds and maintains its humor and is helped by a totally game (though oddly bland) Brie Larson in the empowering title role.

Surrounding that specialness is standard-issue Marveldom, filled with A-list actors earning huge paydays and lots of CGI razzle-dazzle. It works exactly as well as it needs to, sometimes a little better.




Viewed March 7, 2019 -- ArcLight Hollywood

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