"Civil War"

  ☆☆ 

Journalists and war have been an incendiary coupling in movies almost as long as there have been movies, and with good reason: A journalist's obligation to objectivity can't help but clash with the realities of war. Even the most dispassionate reporter or photographer falls victim to compassion and humanity.

Alex Garland's Civil War proposes, in theory, at least, to explore this effective topic from a totally new perspective. The movie supposes that a civil war has engulfed the United States, and follows journalists assigned to cover it. There's almost no way such an incendiary idea could go wrong. Almost. At every opportunity, though, this movie, which Garland wrote and directed, gets it all disastrously wrong. The movie takes no stance—either on the war it depicts or, more awfully, on the role journalists play in bringing that war to the world.

What do the reporters in Civil War even do? About two-thirds of way through, we learn that at least one of them, possibly two, work for Reuters. The name is given not because of Reuters' role as a global news organization, but because it sounds foreign. Until then, all we've known is that another of the journalists works for The New York Times, though he never seems to file a story or report on anything, while another is ... well, not even a journalist.

Jesse (Cailee Spaeny) a fresh-faced, innocent 23-year-old who idolizes Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a gruff, hard-nosed war photographer who has seen atrocities around the world but has never seen anything like this. Or maybe she has. We never really learn her position on the war, nor that of Joel (Wagner Moura), ostensibly the reporter of the bunch, nor of Sam (the ever-reliable Stephen McKinley Harrison), that New York Times reporter. Lee and Joel are on their way from New York City to the front lines of Washington, D.C., where they want to interview the president. He's a third-term hardliner, though of what variety we're never told. At the beginning of Civil War, he's professing a near-victory against the "Western Forces," a coalition of Texas and California. Florida is allied with the Western Forces.

That's what kind of movie Civil War is. It seems almost proudly oblivious of the politics of the moment (if a "moment" can last close to a decade), and in interviews Garland has said he wanted to make a movie about journalists and war, not about the causes of war. It's a near-fatal decision for his film. Imagine Casablanca without a sense of loyalties; imagine Inglourious Basterds without taking sides; imagine The Killing Fields in which there is no Khmer Rouge, just a lot of fighting.

It's not as if Garland doesn't tip his hat more than once to what might be going on. The clearest villains in Civil War all talk with drawls, look like central casting was asked for "hillbillies," and spit a lot. One of them, in a much-talked-about cameo by Jesse Plemons, has a real problem with minorities. But the movie still refuses to tell us anything. The journalists are conflicted, because they see too many people gunned down, sometimes without reason. What they see is hard to stomach.

But there's no effort to help us understand it. Are we to be surprised that war is hell? That an America engulfed in a true civil war would be a horrifying sight?

The movie leads up to a CG-laden battle replete with all the macho bravado of a modern video game. Logically, nothing about the climax makes sense, particularly the fact that, other than a couple of embedded journalists, there seem to be no other reporters around. In the world of Civil War, there are only about four journalists left, they never file stories or send photos (well, once), and the impact of their work is unknown. It's not the only thing about Civil War that's unknown. Including why anyone would want to make a movie like this and then take out everything that might make it interesting.

Viewed April 27, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Hundreds of Beavers"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

It's a depressing, distressing time for the movie industry, and it's easy to lose heart. But if we can't turn to Hollywood studios and ubiquitous streamers for the answer, maybe few intrepid filmmakers in the frozen wilderness of Wisconsin hold the answer to how to bring back some of the magic of the movies.

Hundreds of Beavers does not follow the model of a Hollywood blockbuster. If there are three acts, I'm not sure what they are; if the main character has a deep and yearning need it's only to figure out what the hell is happening to him; and there's not much in the way of dialogue. It's mostly a silent movie, shot in grainy black and white, and looks like it was stitched together on someone's MacBook. Those are attributes. They're features, not bugs of this silly and subversive slapstick comedy.

Hundreds of Beavers seems inspired as much by the great silent comedies as by a video game, as it drops viewers into a surreal setting in which there appears to be nothing much like rules, plot or even a point. Give it time. It will all make sense. Or, more to the point, it will all make absolutely no sense, but there's an incredibly good chance you will find that sense is the last thing Hundreds of Beavers needs.

An actor with the unlikely name Ryland Erickson Cole Tews plays a man named Jean Kayak, who begins as a drunkard obsessed with applejack who, in a turn of events that cannot and should not be explained, ends up alone and freezing in a snowy wilderness. He needs to survive. The forest creatures around him, especially the beavers and the wolves, have other plans for him.

None of this is intended to bear any resemblance to reality, especially those creatures, who are played by performers in human-sized mascot suits. As he tries to find a tasty critter or two to eat, Jean Kayak stumbles upon a master trapper who looks like Santa with a sleigh pulled by human-sized, poker-playing dogs, and learns about a fur trader with a winsome daughter.

Hundreds of Beavers is pure slapstick. The applejack drunkard becomes a fur trapper, intent on waging war with the denizens of the snow-covered forest, who aren't as dumb (or as sweet and cute) as they appear. Jean Kayak becomes Wile E. Coyote chasing after untold numbers of Road Runners. And those beavers ... well, they have something even grander in mind.

Judging by the audience I saw it with, Hundreds of Beavers will bemuse you with its entirely unpredictable antics, or possibly drive you absolutely mad with laughter. Some people in the audience seemed ready to laugh to death like those weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Even those who seemed unsure what to make of it couldn't help be drawn in to its weird, wild, wonderful world in which reality dares not intrude. It's as completely imagined as the most advanced CGI landscape, with none of the polished perfection. And in that, it succeeds even better than any big-screen blockbuster.

By the time Jean Kayak finds himself being chased by those literal hundreds of beavers (study the movie's poster if you want some wacky clues to what's in store), this movie, made at a reported cost of $150,000, will have convinced you that the future of movies can be a happy, inventive, and daring one. Isn't it wild what beavers can teach us?

Viewed April 14, 2024 — Laemmle NoHo

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"The First Omen"

   ☆☆ 

There is only one way for a prequel to end, and The First Omen manages to end at almost exactly the moment that 1976's original The Omen (which now can no longer be called "the first Omen," I guess): A baby is born and given to the U.S. ambassador to Rome—which in the world in which the Omen franchise, as it's come to be called, takes place is apparently a heartbeat away from the presidency.

I won't ask you to name the last ambassador to any country (or city) has been in such a powerful position, but apparently the people who helped bring that antichrist to life believe that this will be the best place for the child to grow into Sam Neill and try to take over the world.

Who were those people? What was their plan? And how did they wrangle the devil into impregnating someone and then kill that woman in order to plant the child with Ambassador Thorn and ensure he would be named Damien?

Assuming you have been wondering about those questions for the last 48 years, then, good news! The First Omen wants to answer those burning questions that have been keeping you up at night after watching movies like The Omen II, Omen III: The Final Conflict, Omen IV: The Awakening and, of course, the 2006 remake of The Omen, in which Julia Stiles and Liev Schreiber were the unwitting parents of the devil in the 21st century. But this movie pretends that movie didn't happen, and The First Omen instead goes all the way back to 1971, five years before the first Omen.

All of this matters, because ... well, it doesn't. Nor, in the end, does The First Omen. This is not a movie likely to ignite a new round of Satanic Panic that will end with hundreds of hysterical accusations that ruined the lives of children and adults alike. The first Omen was a pretty ridiculous movie, but between it and The Exorcist managed to influence an entire nation. Pity the adult who was named Damien in the years before its release.

Nonetheless, The First Omen begins in 1971 in Rome when Margaret, a plucky young American woman (played by British actress Nell Tiger Free), journeys to an orphanage that is as dimly lit, shadowy and crumbling as you can hope a Roman orphanage to be. There are sinister goings on. Of course there are. The nuns are creepy. Of course they are. The nuns explain why these religious horror movies never involve Protestants, I guess. One of the nuns is Sônia Braga, oddly enough.

Margaret begins to suspect that there's something fishy happening in those musty hallways. Then, a gravelly voiced, excommunicated priest (Ralph Ineson) who made an appearance in the grotesque prologue, shows up and tells Margaret to meet him late at night in another shadowy room, and tells her of an ambitious, complicated plan to bring about the birth of the antichrist, which of course we know is going to happen because we've seen cherub-faced Damien drive all those zoo animals crazy.

So, The First Omen turns into more of a conspiracy thriller than a horror film, until its final act, in which all sorts of grotesque things happen and there's a sudden plot switch-up that you will not see coming unless, like me, you saw it coming.

There's one scene in which Free shows herself to be an actress of remarkable ability. The scene can't be described without giving away that long-ago-telegraphed plot twist, but suffice it to say: This may be a bad movie, but she does something extraordinary on camera in one long take that for a moment lifts the film above the ordinary.

Then it sinks back down. And down. And down into a ludicrous finale and an even more ludicrous final scene that tries to both connect the film to The Omen from 1976 and set things up for an unrelated sequel. Let's hope it doesn't come. But if it must, let's hope Free is available for it. She at least makes things interesting.

Viewed April 13, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Late Night With the Devil"

   ☆☆☆ 

After a much longer moviegoing break than I anticipated due to unexpected crises, I returned to the place whose specialness has been made banal by Nicole Kidman's endless insistence that it's magic: the cinema. Yup, Nicole's still there, albeit in a mercifully shorter, still hilariously self-serving sort of way. And the movie I saw wasn't especially good, though it wasn't particularly bad, either, but that's the point: Late Night With the Devil, a low-budget Australian horror film, is exactly the kind of movie that benefits from being seen in a movie theater.

Is it worth the ever-increasing cost of a night out at the movies? Maybe not. Then again, I'm still a member in what is one of the worst-conceived ideas in movie history: a moviegoing subscription service. These services, like the scam MoviePass that triggered the craze to charge moviegoers one price each month and give them (at one point) unlimited movies, have only cheapened the experience. To members of these programs, movies have become, essentially, worthless. Between these programs and streaming services, the concept of moviegoing has, for too many people, become something without value. It is a cheap, throwaway experience that can, if played right, cost as little as a couple of bucks for a show.

It's natural, I suppose, that "content producers," those behemoths that used to be called movie studios, have responded by releasing comparatively few movies on the big screen, and doing all they can to ensure those movies are big, loud, dumb and popular.

So, how does a movie like Late Night With the Devil even make it into theaters? In this case, perhaps chalk it up to last year's crisis-level strikes by actors and writers, which have left those places formerly called studios with far too little "content" to release to both theaters and streaming services; and to the time of year. Springtime has always been horror time, and horror excels at low budgets with few stars.

David Dastmalchian, an actor you've undoubtedly seen but wouldn't know by name, is the star of Late Night With the Devil. The movie is a riff on the "found-footage" horror trope that's been going on since The Blair Witch Project (which, I hate to break it to you, was 25 years ago now). In this case, the movie purports to be a combination of video that aired on TV in 1977, and never-before-seen backstage footage of the event that, so the movie proposes, galvanized audiences. The incident was an exorcism that aired on a syndicated late-night TV talk show.

The most interesting thing to me about Late Night With the Devil is how it was made by a streaming service (Shudder) to be shown on television, but is a movie I would have absolutely no patience for at home. It's slow to start, relies on insider knowledge about the TV industry, and assumes a desire to see a gentle satire of television as it existed nearly 50 years ago. By the time the movie gets to its core story, I would have long lost interest and found something else to watch. That's the thing about "television" today: There is always something else to watch. Too much.

But in a movie theater, in that space Nicole Kidman insists is "magic," you've got only a few choices: pay attention, fall asleep (or maybe turn your attention to your date, if so inclined), or leave. (Sadly, there's an increasingly popular fourth option: play on your phone. I don't condone that.) Usually, stuck in a dark room and knowing we've paid money—at least, we used to—and made the effort to be there, we opt for the first choice. That's what I did with Late Night With the Devil. I would never, ever have done that at home.

It's okay. It's not great, but it doesn't need to be. It's an attention-grabber, it's weird, it's funny, and it's enough. It kept me entertained, I got a night out with my husband, we felt we were taking part in life, and we had something to talk about on the way home. There was a time, a very good and very long time, we didn't expect or demand much more of our movies than that. Late Night With the Devil reminded me of those times. I miss those times. I hope Hollywood gets its act together soon and remembers the movies, even so-so ones, belong in movie theaters. Late Night With the Devil wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but all in all, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Viewed April 6, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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