"My Old Ass"

 ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Barely 90 minutes long, My Old Ass packs into its brief screen time more wit, fun and genuine insight into the human condition than a film twice its length. Positioned as the latest in a mildly offensive but funny string of comedies fronted by young women, My Old Ass turns out to be something very different, not at all as sarcastic and acerbic as its marketing suggests.

Very near the end of its compact story, My Old Ass throws a wallop of a punch, not a plot twist as much as a plot development so unexpected that, in retrospect, it seems obvious. It's not a trick, and it elevates My Old Ass into something rare indeed: a comedy made for and about young people that offers even more for grown-ups.

The story sounds like Freaky Friday or 13 Going on 30 for a looser era—on the night of her 18th birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her friends experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms. During her trippy high, a 39-year-old version of Elliott (Aubrey Plaza) shows up without notice and offers a glimpse at life as an early middle-ager. She also drops her number into young Elliott's phone, and provides a vague warning: At all costs, avoid guys named "Chad."

Turns out, that's the name of the geekily handsome kid working on her father's cranberry farm in rural Ontario. Elliott figures she doesn't have much to be concerned about, since she's comfortable with her own sexuality, which precludes dalliances with men of any name, including Chad.

But Old Elliott knows some things Young Elliott doesn't, and though she won't reveal much about the potentially dystopian—yet comfortably there—world in which she lives, she does urge her younger self to be more focused on appreciating the things she has in her not-yet-complicated life.

As Elliott's last summer with her family winds to a close, she finds herself taking solace in the sage words of wisdom her Old Ass offers ... until the older Elliott stops responding, and life takes on infinitely more complexity. 

Shot in sun-soaked, golden tones that evoke the kind of summer life that exists, perhaps, only in memory, My Old Ass never lets go of its comedic sensibilities, which are impressive, but layers in astonishingly deep emotion in even the smallest of moments. Elliott's home life seems simple, even pastoral, yet as she looks closer she discovers nuances she never noticed. This richness of director Megan Park's screenplay lends a serene wistfulness to every scene in the film—as soon as Old Elliott appears, it's clear the most important idea she wants to convey is that Elliott needs to pay attention to all the things that will slip away. And yet, since they haven't happened to Young Elliott yet, she can't notice—one of the paradoxes, like the gentle version of time travel at its core, the film relishes.

Park previously made the extraordinary, deeply affecting teen drama The Fallout, which explored the complicated reality of teen life with sensitivity and honesty, and My Old Ass builds on it further, offering a vision of modern youth that feels less despondent but equally deep.

It's worth noting, since she is such a strong screen presence and rarely makes a misstep, that Aubrey Plaza plays a supporting role in My Old Ass—the star is Maisy Stella, who is radiant. She commands the screen with ease in a film that demands a lot from her. There's more complexity to her role, to her character, and to the film, than meets the eye, and it's both a surprise and a delight that My Old Ass turns out to be one of the best films of 2024, and the most emotionally rewarding.

Viewed September 28, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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"The Substance"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

The Substance is demented, completely unhinged, and insanely grotesque, and those among its best qualities. It's a satire, and a good one, but it's also—maybe even primarily—a body-horror movie, a film that in many scenes directly recalls and references David Cronenberg's 1986 masterpiece of body horror The Fly. I suppose what you will make of The Substance depends in large part on your feelings about The Fly, since much of The Substance makes The Fly look like a G-rated Disney movie.

The Substance, which also recalls a lot of Kubrick, is written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, and few filmmakers dare as much as she does in this film, which, it cannot be stated enough, is not for the squeamish. When I saw The Substance, some audience members got all the way to about the two hour mark of this 140-minute film and then decided they had seen enough. It's that kind of movie. You may decide you've seen enough long before that, or you may decide that too much is never enough—which certainly would seem to be Fargeat's attitude.

In The Substance, Demi Moore, an actress who became known in her 20s and is now in her 60s, plays a celebrity named Elisabeth Sparkle who became known in her youth and is now far from young. As The Substance begins, nobody comments on how ravishing she looks (which she does), or how extraordinarily well she has aged (which she has), they just know she's old. So they fire her.

At the same time, she encounters a mysterious come-on for a substance called, well, The Substance. She watches a slick advertisement for a neon-green liquid that makes some mighty big promises. There appear to be two customers for The Substance, and you may wonder how something like this, which couldn't have been cheap to develop, much less market, manages to keep going with just two customers. It's better not to ask. It's better not to ask about most things in The Substance—inner logic is not one of the movie's strong points, nor does it need to be.

The Substance also doesn't have much in the way of instructions. Like Apple products, it's one of those IYKYK sort of things, and apparently Elisabeth figures it out, because as soon as she injects herself with The Substance, out pops (and, boy, does it pop) another version of herself: young, big-breasted, tight-assed, effortlessly beautiful. But, as the people behind The Substance keep explaining, it's not a separate person: There is only one. Elisabeth has been divided. But her other half, a perky ingenue known as Sue, sees herself as something wholly separate. And there's the rub.

One of them, at least. The other is that The Substance comes with a few rules. Chief among them is: Never, ever feed them after midni— wait, wrong horror-comedy. It's that the two halves of Elisabeth must switch every seven days. If Sue doesn't give up her sexy body and newfound fame in the seven days, well ... something will happen.

And it does. With increasingly horrifying results, most of which are also painfully, awfully funny. The Substance really does excel as satire of the highest sort: It's genuinely funny, even while being utterly absorbing and fantastically unpredictable. As the movie careens around its steep, dizzying track, it threatens to go off the rails, but Fargeat keeps it going even as she forces the audience to watch through closed eyes or through their fingers. (I don't know that I've ever really, actually watched a movie through my fingers ... until now. The Substance offers moments that go beyond mere cringe.)

Just when you think it can't get any more outrageous, Fargeat offers a surprise. It's one that almost works, even when, with unexpected glee, the movie layers in Bernard Hermann's love theme from Vertigo. The whole thing comes so close to perfection that its penultimate scene falls unexpectedly flat. It's the one moment that Fargeat ought to pull back but doesn't. Yet the whole thing recovers for one of the most bizarre and unforgettable final shots in movie history.

Anchoring it all are Demi Moore, who gives herself entirely to the role, and Margaret Qualley as her literal other half. Individually and together, they make The Substance work, even in its wildest and most impossible moments. They and the film are fearless, and if fearlessness takes it into territory it can't quite make work, that's more than all right: Few films are as bold, as interesting, and as full-bore bonkers as The Substance.

Viewed September 22, 2024 — AMC Century City 15

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"Speak No Evil"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

As an exercise in suspense and tension, Speak No Evil works fantastically well, so well that it's not until after the credits have rolled and you're in the car and on the way home that you might begin to start questioning some of the basic elements of the plot, especially in the last 20 minutes or so.

At that point, it's far too late to matter, so if Speak No Evil feels a little weaker in retrospect than it did while on screen, it seems pointless to quibble. This movie does what it does with ruthless efficiency, it's got a great, long wind-up, and when it sets everything in motion it's almost impossible to turn away from the screen, even in the bloodiest moments, when you most desperately want to. Speak No Evil is, in the moment, so good that it forces you to watch.

This movie is based on a Dutch film, also called Speak No Evil, that I've never seen, though from what I've read the title of that film may make a little more sense than the title of this film. In both, a friendly couple and their daughter meet a boisterous, borderline irritating, couple from the middle of nowhere. They have a son who has difficulty communicating. The more gregarious couple invites the more reserved one to visit their country home.

In this film, the fussier couple is American, and their backstory is convoluted, though suffice it to say they are the kind of people who have moved to London and can afford both a stylish apartment and a Tesla. When they get the invitation to the boondocks—the "West Country," in this version—one of them is hesitant, the other is effusive, but they end up going.

That's where they reunite with Paddy, who says he is a doctor; his wife, Chiara, who does seem a tad young for the man; and their son, Ant, the one who doesn't talk. Ben is the American, a man who has lost his way, though his wife Louise and his daughter Agnes are trying hard to reconcile the family's many complications.

That the weekend doesn't go as planned won't come as a surprise, though exactly why and what the nice American couple discover is something you should know as little about as possible before watching the film.

This is the kind of movie that takes place in a rambling old country home with neighbors whose proximity is measured in miles, not meters. In the history of film and literature, nothing good has ever happened in a country home like this one (that even extends to the heartbreaking conclusion of Call Me By Your Name), so it should be no surprise that things go very, very badly for the Americans.

Much blood is spilled, and many words are shouted or whispered at the screen during the course of Speak No Evil, and the movie is so tautly made that none of its iffier elements matter at all, not even when that one character pushes that other character into the water at the end in a moment that defies all logic and credibility. But, still, you're likely to be with the movie because you just want to know how it's going to end, who's going to get out of this alive, and how. Or if.

In that, my understanding is that Speak No Evil comes to a radically different conclusion than the original, much in the same way, I suppose, as the twisted, evil, shocking ending of George Sluizer's exemplary 1988 thriller The Vanishing "had" to be revised for Hollywood. Since I've not seen the original Speak No Evil, all I know is that this remake of the film has an efficient, effective and satisfactory—if not entirely satisfying—ending, but one that is vastly different than the original.

Yet with a towering central performance by James McAvoy that is matched in enthusiasm, if not volume, by the full cast, and a sly satirical manner that offers a lot of humor amid the bloodshed, Speak No Evil works well. Maybe not as well as the first, from all I've heard, but quite well enough on its own terms.

Viewed September 15, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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"Alien: Romulus"

  ☆☆☆ 

Alien is a masterpiece of suspense and horror, a haunted-house film in outer space. Aliens is a masterpiece of tension and anxiety, an unrelenting action thriller set on another planet. These two movies are about as good as modern science-fiction movies get, so it was reasonable to have high expectations for their prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, both of which turned out to be duds that—to be fair—have their fans.

Those two Ridley Scott-directed films were so bad, and direct sequels like Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection were also awful. The less said about the Alien vs. Predator films, of which I've seen only segments, the better. In short: Eight Alien movies, two gems, six duds.

The track record going in to Alien: Romulus is pretty miserable, and its director, Fede Alvarez, directed a horror film called Don't Breathe that I found one of the most repugnant and offensive films I've ever watched. I sat down to watch Alien: Romulus with the lowest of low expectations.

That the film far surpasses those expectations is a genuine surprise. While Alien: Romulus will be nonsensical if you've never seen at least the first two films—and will test your power of recall for Prometheus, a film otherwise best put out of your mind—as Alien movies go, it's in the top three.

It can't come close to the pure visceral terror of Alien or the exhilarating, exhausting experience of watching Aliens. Those movies are rare achievements. Alien: Romulus is a streaming-era reboot, a movie that at every turn recalls both the 1979 original and its 1986 sequel, steals from them gleefully (and sometimes unwisely), and does its best to match their style.

The most difficult trick Alien: Romulus needs to achieve is getting the film back into space and finding a sufficiently tight location to set its action. To that end, the set-up of Alien: Romulus is both perfunctory, contrived and almost needlessly complex, but it works. A young woman who has lived her entire life on a mining colony 65 light years from Earth is ready to leave the unhappy world, which is cloaked in eternal darkness. But the company for which she works—the company that, in the world of Alien, rules everything—won't let her go.

She and a ragtag group of young friends hatch a scheme that strains credulity as they hijack a ship they intend to use to go to a ... well, look, never mind. It's all complicated and dense, not helped by a sound mix that emphasizes loud noises over crisp dialogue. Just know that in many regards, Alien: Romulus could also be called Teen Alien. With one glaring and awkward exception, the main cast here is young, reasonably good-looking, and filled with comparisons to characters in the earlier films.

They wind up on a space station called Romulus (well, half of it is, at least), where they run smack into the aliens, which fans know as Xenomorphs. There are the face-hugger versions that previously lived in eggs, there are the full-scale versions, whose metamorphosis we see in slimy, icky detail here, and all of them move fast. Of the group of kids who walk onto the space station, only one or two will survive, that's a given. The purpose of Alien: Romulus, then, is to dispatch the others with as much suspense as possible.

It's done pretty well. The movie is sometimes suspenseful, almost never scary, and moves quickly. In its final act—driven by the unwise reappearance of a character from an earlier Alien movie, which feels inappropriate and grotesque—it becomes downright silly. A plot twist that relies on information from Prometheus is at first head-scratching and then borderline laughable, but Alien: Romulus moves at a fast enough pace that we never care all that much.

That's really the biggest downside to the film: It doesn't give us characters that resonate. Except for its lead, Rain (played by Cailee Spainey from Civil War), and David Jonsson, who's very impressive as her android, Andy, the cast of characters is interchangeable and unmemorable. But the movie moves swiftly, it looks fantastic, and it has a muscular, impressive score by Benjamin Wallfisch that, like the rest of the movie, nicely recalls the first two films.

Alien: Romulus has been given one task: make a better Alien movie than we've seen in the last 38 years. It does that task well enough. Considering what's come before it, that's a pleasant surprise.

Viewed August 24, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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"Longlegs"

  ☆½ 

After years and years of slasher films, moviemakers got the idea way back in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project that less on screen is more, and while it wasn't the wrong idea to get, a quarter century of "restrained" horror films demonstrates that far too often less is actually less.

Horror movies have become a kind of Rorschach test for a certain kind of moviegoer. If you don't get subtle meanings and cinematic references of "elevated" horror movies, you're somehow inferior. That's my biggest takeaway from Longlegs, which has received rapturous critical acclaim but is one of the dullest, least interesting movies—horror or any other kind—I've seen in a long time.

In Longlegs, tedium largely substitutes for tension, though there is a fair amount of the latter in the claustrophobic first few minutes, in which a young girl leaves the confines of her snowy white house to investigate the arrival of a very weird and disturbing stranger. This is the "Longlegs" of the film's title, an uncomfortably androgynous character. The movie is careful to describe him as a man, lest we get the wrong idea and think that Longlegs might be venturing into some dicey transphobic territory.

The gender of "Longlegs" turns out not to matter, just like the weird motives of the character really don't matter. Nor does the increasingly bizarre connection that this grotesque and outrageous character (played by Nicolas Cage, in no-holds-barred Nicolas Cage style) has with the FBI agent investigating him.  Very little turns out to matter in this slog of a film.

Longlegs may or may not be responsible for killing multiple families, who die in what appear to be murder-suicides. But there's reason to believe someone is behind the deaths, so the FBI brings in a "half-psychic" agent named Lee Harker (horror fans may try to make something of that last name). She's played by Maika Monroe as a permanently anxious yet stone-faced cipher whose childhood is the one depicted in the first few minutes of the movie.

There are more and more connections between Harker and Longlegs, so many that it seems impossible, after a time, to imagine that nobody put two and two together before this. The coincidences and intersections pile up in the increasingly stupid script by director Osgood Perkins. Trying desperately to be a "slow burn," Longlegs moves at such a glacial pace it sometimes seems to stop altogether. Though it's punctuated by bits of shocking violence and extreme gore, none of it is interesting.

Because both movies deal with young FBI agents trailing serial killers, there have been attempts to compare Longlegs with The Silence of the Lambs, but don't be fooled. Lambs grounded its characters in recognizable reality, and offered no motive for Hannibal Lecter beyond pure evil. Longlegs is all over the place trying to build up a mythology so complicated and nonsensical that it becomes unintentionally hilarious. There's nothing scary or shocking about Longlegs, despite those bursts of gore, because it doesn't exist in a world that looks anything like our own.

It's a dumb, dull exercise in "elevated" horror, a freak show that can't live up to the hype.

Viewed August 11, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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"A Quiet Place: Day One"

  ☆☆☆ 

Between the release of A Quiet Place in 2018 and A Quiet Place 2 in 2021, something odd happened: The world almost ended.

Is that hyperbole? Think back exactly four years, when we were inundated with images of death and violence, when we couldn't conceive of a future that hadn't changed in incalculable ways. Now we're in that future, and maybe it hasn't changed all that much, but we have.

That creates an interesting sort of problem for movies about the apocalypse. When we've seen what the world looks like when it's at the brink, it's hard to let go of disbelief, and in a movie like A Quiet Place: Day One that's even more critical than the movies that have come before.

Where, for instance, are the naysayers? Even when faced with certain annihilation, what we know now is that there would be a faction or two hundred that insists the whole thing is a government conspiracy. When told to literally be quiet, there are an awful lot of people who would insist they have every right to be noisy.

On the subject of noise, A Quiet Place: Day One opens with a title card that lets us know that New York City constantly emits sounds that are as loud as a human scream. What we know from the previous Quiet Place films is that the alien invaders are intolerant of loud sounds. Which begs the question: Why would they choose New York? Couldn't they hear the high-pitched squeal of subway brakes? Wouldn't that kill them all upon landing?

Alas, A Quiet Place: Day One offers 90 minutes to ponder such questions even while it delivers a story that is reasonably tense and astonishingly well acted by its three central performers: Lupita Nyong'o, as a poet dying of cancer who ends up fighting for her life in a different way; Joseph Quinn as a law student with a remarkably resilient wash-and-wear suit and tie; and Schnitzel and Nico, who play a cat named Frodo who steals every scene in which he appears (which is most of them).

The movie offers a motivation beyond the obvious for Nyong'o's character, Sam, to try to make her way north out of midtown. It seems like a flimsy sort of excuse to flirt with extreme danger and almost certain death, and when she's joined by Quinn's Eric the willingness of the two to make the journey is yet another one of those head-scratching moments. And yet, it ends up offering a strong and effective catharsis, and a rarity in a horror film: a scene of touching, tender humanity. That scene between the three main characters makes most of the rest of the experience worth it—but can't negate how strange the whole experience is.

Since this is a prequel, we already know most of the outcome, we know what becomes of the monsters, so we're left asking endless questions based on all the information we already have. I couldn't help but wonder about all the plot holes, all the rules of how the monsters behave that are seemingly violated in A Quiet Place: Day One. But then the movie came back to Nyong'o, Quinn and the cat—especially the cat— and that turns out to be, just barely, enough.

The apocalypse won't look like this, but hopefully the cats will cooperate.

Viewed July 4, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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"Thelma"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Pay attention in the opening scenes of Thelma, and see if you can spot the scam. You'll know it once it happens. You may even recognize it while it's happening. But the setup, the way the scammers hook 93-year-old Thelma Post into sending them $10,000 in cash, is convincing.

How do "old people" not realize they're being scammed? The same way you might fall for the big lie while you're watching Thelma. And that's sort of the point: Yes, Thelma is old, yes she spouts funny malapropisms, and no, she doesn't entirely understand how a computer works.

Do you?

The phone call Thelma gets sets her off on a grand adventure. It's tempting to call it a minor adventure, but anyone who lives in L.A. will know that Thelma covers a lot of ground in her quest to get that money back from the bad guys who conned her into giving it to them.

Played by 94-year-old June Squibb, Thelma is the widowed grandmother to Danny (Fred Hechinger), a Gen Z slacker who makes Gen X slackers look like overachievers by comparison. He's the one who unwittingly gets the action of Thelma rolling, and though he doesn't have a clue how life works, he's a doting grandson who prefers her to his parents—including Thelma's hyper-attentive daughter (Parker Posey)—and will do anything he can to help her.

Except, here's the kicker, the real crux of Thelma: She doesn't want his help. She doesn't want anyone's help. And she's not just stubborn. She knows she's old, but after such a long life, doesn't she get to live what's left on her own terms? This struggle for independence is what drives Thelma and gives it deeper meaning than a simple granny-with-a-gun tale.

In addition to Danny, her friend Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in his final role, wants to help Thelma. She only wants his electric scooter. But pretty soon they're gallivanting around the San Fernando Valley together, doing their best to stay one step ahead of her family.

It's a delightfully silly and thoroughly absorbing romp, one that recalls the more character-driven goofy comedies of the 1970s and early 1980s like 9 to 5 and Melvin and Howard, all held together by Oscar-nominated June Squibb, now in her third decade of a late-in-life career (her first on-screen role came when she was 56, her first movie role when she was 61). She's droll and straightforward and no-nonsense, a real character in the best sense, a character who feels complete and complicated.

And she is. That's the best part about Thelma. Sure, the jazzy score that could have come from a 1970s caper is fun, and all the performances—especially Hechinger—are top-notch. But it's Thelma's humanity that drives this film, even through it's more preposterous action-driven sections. Toward the end of the movie comes a gentle, human-scaled little scene that takes place on a park bench as Thelma talks to her grandson. Their exchange does something entirely unexpected in a film that has, by and large, lived up to our expectations to that point—it knocks the wind out of you. When I saw Thelma, the packed theater fell completely silent except for some uncontrollable crying jags.

Which isn't to say Thelma is sad or depressing or troubling. It's none of those things—well, maybe a couple of those things, though tangentially. The reason for the emotional response was ... no, on second thought, you'll need to see it yourself to find out. If you do, you'll discover that Thelma is big-hearted, effortlessly entertaining, and, in the best ways, as much a surprise as the woman herself. 

Viewed June 23, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

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