"Air"

    ☆☆☆ 

Air is a perfectly affable bit of marketing history, which is interesting in itself, as marketing initiatives don't normally merit the big-screen treatment. Air doesn't really feel like it believes it warrants the big-screen treatment, and it's no surprise at all that the film is directed by Ben Affleck for Amazon Studios. It feels like a streaming movie, a perfectly fine way to spend a couple of hours when there's nothing better to do.

Air is a little better than that, actually, because it features a late-in-the-game stunner, a sharp, impassioned, moving monologue that cuts to the heart of everything Air believes it's about: heroism, bravery, myth-making. What Air doesn't seem to believe it's about is crass profiteering, marketing meant to drive sales.

It's about a specific moment in time, 1984 to be precise, when still-fledgling Nike decided to get into the "basketball shoe" business by courting Michael Jordan to wear and promote its shoes. A lot turned on that moment — it led to the celebrity-obsessed, insanely big-money, captialism-on-steroids world we're in today. It wouldn't take much to argue that the heroes of Air aren't really heroes at all, they're just business people who (maybe) unintentionally opened the door to some pretty awful things for the world.

But Air lacks any hint of cynicism. This isn't Moneyball or Jerry Maguire, and it's definitely not scabrous like, say, Network or Ace in the Hole. It's nice. It believes its central characters are doing good things. Even when they're kind of rotten and kind of sarcastic, they're still nice — and Matt Damon's Sonny Vaccaro, an actual Nike executive who really did the things that happen in the movie (there are even photos in the credits to prove it), really seems to believe everything he says in that speech.

It's stirring. It's wonderful. It makes Air worth seeing, I think, even if though it's warm and moving when perhaps it should be just a little bit angrier than that. Air believes the only real arbiter of success is money — it just doesn't have the strength of conviction to come right out and say it.

Viewed April 30, 2023 — AMC Burbank 6

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"Beau Is Afraid"

   ☆☆½ 

In 1987, Woody Allen made a film in which an anxious, neurotic dweller in the big city encounters unexpected, surreal difficulties with his mother. The film was Oedipus Wrecks, included in New York Stories, and at 40 minutes it made its point, provided some amusement, and overstayed its welcome.

Now, Ari Aster, fresh off the undeniable (if divisive) arthouse horror hits Hereditary and Midsommar, has made a film in which an anxious, neurotic dweller in the big city encounters unexpected, surreal difficulties with his mother. Aster's film is ten minutes shy of three hours, and to say it overstays its welcome would be a drastic understatement.

Other than that most vague of summaries of Beau Is Afraid, there isn't much way to describe what happens in the movie, which takes place in some alternate universe of a MAGA-ites worst nightmares about urban violence and artistic theater types and a liberal's most ardent fever dreams about big business, suburbia and military veterans.

Within its rambling three hours are grotesque giant penises, enormous testicles, vomit, much blood, ample nudity, intense violence, questions of incest and sexual dysfunction, plus surreal moments played both for laughs and for artistic integrity — like a hypnotic (that's not necessarily a good thing) animated sequence that's simultaneously dazzling and dull.

There's one moment in the film in which one character — it's far too difficult to try to explain who — is doing a puzzle and Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) says he's found the piece she needs. Beau Is Afraid is a lot like a cinematic puzzle, or maybe an intellectual's film version of an escape room: It offers intriguing, sometimes genuinely tantalizing, individual pieces, but none of them add up to a whole or offer anything like a solution. There are hints at dystopian science fiction, weird echoes of corporate satire, and a lot of amusing and silly spoofs of popular culture ("Professor Marvelous!"  reads a poster on a bedroom wall, a dig at super-hero movies).

But what does it mean? A film doesn't necessarily need to offer any solutions — we've been scratching our collective heads over Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for nearly 60 years. But there should be some point, some cohesive idea, not just a bunch of strange images and even weirder plot twists that never pay off. There are call-outs to The Truman Show, The Shining, Ex Machina and Defending Your Life (weirdly) throughout, yet none of it ever coalesces.

If it's meant to be a head-scratcher, it is. And except for that languorous animated sequence (both a marvel and a challenge to behold), it's never boring. Beau Is Afraid is compulsively watchable, I'll give it that — but what are we watching? And why? In the end, I am afraid the answer is: not much.

Viewed April 23, 2023 — AMC Topanga 12

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"How to Blow Up a Pipeline"

   ☆☆☆☆ 

It's hard to imagine a genre more difficult to pull off than the environmental thriller. The 1970s brought us the definitive one with The China Syndrome (a movie still as nerve-wracking and engrossing today as in 1979), and since then? I can think of dubious attempts: The Day After Tomorrow or the bizarre '80s experience of John Boorman's The Emerald Forest, but it's not done often.

An environmental movie must, at its heart, preach. Audiences aren't much for preaching, especially these days. And a thriller needs to thrill. Preaching and thrilling are usually not closely related.

All that makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a movie whose central plot and its general attitude are sharply conveyed in its in-your-face title, a real surprise. As a thriller, it's a genuine nail-biter. Its central thesis of irreversible damage caused by the oil industry is hardly a new concept, but here it's presented with alarming humanity.

The movie follows eight people in their 20s and 30s as they concoct a scheme to, you guessed it, blow up a pipeline. Each has a reason for being there, and some of the reasons are not at all what you might imagine as they're revealed, slowly, in intermittent flashbacks.

Some of the tension is the old-fashioned sort that would make Hitchcock light up with glee: bombs being built by someone who doesn't necessarily know how to build bombs; synchronized watches that count down the moments to the planned detonation; the inevitability of being caught doing bad deeds on federal land.

Each character is tightly drawn, and the movie has a sly way of withholding key information about some of the perpetrators until the very end, with revelations that cause us to rethink everything we thought we knew. Even a hardcore conservative who argues that these are nothing but punk kids who deserve anything that's coming to them will find it impossible not to be riveted by their exploits.

Though it lacks a certain finesse and sometimes seems a little too relaxed with some of its storytelling, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a real rarity: a thriller that thrills even while it gets its audiences to think.

Viewed April 19, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

When we stopped going to movie theaters 37 months ago, I said I was done writing this blog. Movies had moved to streaming, exhibitors had given up, and even studios — you know, the places that make movies — had given up. It was a dark time all around. For the last year or so, the movies have been back at something like half-speed, though there have been weeks at a time when our personal moviegoing (my husband and me, not the Royal We) has been back more or less to normal: Once, occasionally twice, a week. But the blog stayed dormant. There were some wonderful films in 2022, and I'd argue it was one of the better years for movies as a whole, but as streaming services seemed determined to kill movie theaters, and movie exhibitors seemed all too willing to oblige, a blog about going to the movies still seemed pointless.

Now comes Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a movie with a title that sounds made up by corporate committee — no doubt I'm missing a ® or ™ symbol here or there. Going in, everything about D&D HAT seems calculated to fully prove the notion that movies are dead, that there is no imagination left, and that we might as well, 100 or so after modern cinema began, start giving up.

There’s a lot of trepidation going in. Still, go in. Because it turns out all those fears, while no doubt well founded, are, in this case at least, wrong. 

To be clear, Dungeons isn't the sole shining beacon that proves we are out of the moviegoing woods. Starting with that title, ending with a smash-crash-bash-em-up finale that is as poorly choreographed,  narratively murky and cinematically exhausting as any Marvel film, there are flaws.

But oh, there are such wonders.

Here is a film that revels in being a film. Though CG is evident throughout, sometimes abundantly, the first thing you may notice about D&D HAT is that it's gloriously, giddily physical. The people, the creatures, the castles (at least once we're inside the walls), the dungeons, the villages, the swords, the costumes are all delightfully tactile, which goes an awfully long way toward taking viewers into the world of the film.

It's a fanciful world, at the intersection of fairy tale and sword-and-sorcery adventure. Populating it are characters who are visually inhuman but recognizably human after all. They're all on a high-stakes, emotionally rich story redolent of Star Wars by way of The Wizard of Oz, but without the pretense of, say, Ridley Scott's Legend or the tacky silliness of The Beastmaster. It doesn't try too hard like Boorman's Excalibur nor become an outright comedy show like the Jumanji remake, a movie it sometimes resembles.

I've not mentioned the plot, because it's one best discovered fresh — ideally by the most cynical eyes possible, ones that are drooping and tired from imagining this going so very, very wrong, of becoming some new version of Transformers films. The less you believe Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves could be engaging, merry, grand, silly and still have an emotional, beating heart at its core, the more you'll resist it, the more you’ll share the perspective it brings to the proceedings, one that almost feels subverting. 

You don't have to know a single thing about Dungeons & Dragons the role-playing game to watch and be made happy by this irresistible film. It might even be best if you're the kind who scoffs at the game. If you are, then you, like me, will sit in front of this film, arms crossed, daring it to impress you, which it will do — and then, I hope, it will do the same thing to you that it did to me:

It will make you believe that movies can be fun again, that they can be (somewhat) original, truly surprising, and a pure delight from start to finish. As much as I liked the movies in 2022, it's been a long time since a film even hinted at the reasons I still love "the movies."

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves did more than hint: It contains them all, and then some. It's the kind of film that makes you want to go see movies more and more often. It's a pure, unalloyed delight.

April 1, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

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