"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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"Perfect Days"

  ☆☆☆☆☆ 

"I went to the woods to live deliberately," Thoreau wrote in Walden, "to front only the essential facts of life." In Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, a man named Hirayama doesn't go into the woods, but brings them closer to him, growing tiny saplings inside his cramped, rundown Tokyo apartment.

The attention he lavishes upon these tiny trees is matched by the attention he gives to his job: cleaning a set of architecturally wondrous toilets in Shibuya. Every day, Hirayama rises, gets himself ready, leaves his apartment with something close to a smile, and treats his job with an earnest respect. He says almost nothing, not even to his talkative, slightly daffy co-worker. This is not a man of few words: For most of Perfect Days, he's a man of no words.

Why? Has he made a decision as bold as Thoreau's? Is there a painful secret in his past? Hirayama has dreams, but they are fleeting images, just dances of light and shadow, echoes of the sunlight that shines through the trees. It's that light, that dazzling sparkle that is only of the moment, that forms something like the heart of Perfect Days. "Komorebi," a post-credit title card explains, is the Japanese word for this concept.

Wenders and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki take enormous care to show us a specific life in tremendous detail, yet as it unfolds there seems almost no plot to drive Perfect Days forward. And still, for two and a half hours Perfect Days is compulsively watchable, and never dull or boring. Perhaps that's because of the pride Hirayama takes in his work and his small, routine-filled life. Or it's because of Wenders' skill as a storyteller, beginning each day with a repetition that recalls the endless loop of Groundhog Day while adding new elements until the cycle repeats in ways that are familiar but that become wholly different.

There is nothing groundbreaking or bold about the filmmaking or the story that unfolds in Perfect Days, and yet as first one, then another, then a multitude of tiny variations and minor revelations (like a game of tic-tac-toe hidden by an unknown customer) elicit surprise, joy, frustration, disappointment, wonder. Hirayama tries to shield himself—through his silence, through his solitude—from life, but life insists on finding him, requires his participation.

Throughout, Wenders and the extraordinary actor Koji Yakusho pull us in to this one simple, specific life, and in the process reveal much more about the ways every one of us exists in the world, how we connect—or don't—with others, how we work in the smallest of ways to get through this day and on to the next. "Now is now," Hirayama observes in one of his rare conversations. It's all anyone is promised. All we can do is make it to the next day. That may, in the end, be all Perfect Days is trying to say. It doesn't sound like much, but in Wenders' hands, it's everything.

And in one stunning, mesmerizing, supremely moving final shot, Perfect Days sums up the hardships, the beauty, the hopes, the fears, the disappointments and the wonder of it all with wordless, exquisite precision. It is, in a word, perfect.

Viewed February 11, 2024 — AMC Century City 15

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"The End We Start From"

    ☆☆½ 

For a movie about the end of the world, or at least about the end of civilization as we know it, The End We Start From is awfully melancholy. Maybe we learned too much in the pandemic: an apocalypse probably won't be accompanied by screaming in the streets and military jets zooming overhead. As we saw ourselves, the beginning of the end can feel surprisingly small and downbeat.

So, I guess it makes sense that The End We Start From is so lugubrious and often dull. But if it's reasonably true to life, it doesn't make for a very involving movie. The End We Start From is engaging enough in fits and starts, but more often so slow it threatens to come to a complete stop.

Jodie Comer plays the unnamed woman at the center of the story, a very expectant mother living in London during one excessively rainy summer, which we gather—and much of this movie requires extrapolation; it's not a film that likes to explain—is the result of a climate catastrophe. She, her husband and her newborn flee to his parents' house on higher ground. The world collapses around them.

And it collapses with rather alarming speed. If we saw for ourselves that the world is shockingly, maybe even disturbingly, resilient (and quick to shrug off the worst), in The World We Live In, society seems to fall apart within a matter of weeks, and in short order the woman and her husband are debating whether to spend time in a shelter.

For those who plan on seeing The End We Start From, it's best to stop there because what few surprises the story contains are about all that keep its energy from flagging. It's a wet rag in every possible way, except for Comer's central performance. She's always interesting, though the movie doesn't give her character much depth. Worse is her husband, presented here as a coward and a dullard; ultimately, the movie's central question becomes whether she will find him again. I kept hoping she wouldn't, and would just start a new and more interesting life.

More strange is the scale of the crisis. We get the sense it's supposed to be massive, yet outside of London there's no sign of disaster, save one brief mention late in the film. Without clarity on the stakes, or the extent to which the world will need to begin again, it's hard to feel very invested. Is it wrong to wish that when the world ends, at least in the movies, it'll feel at least a little significant?

Viewed January 21, 2023 — AMC Universal 16

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"American Fiction"

    ☆☆☆ 

American Fiction is nothing if not ambitious. In less than two hours, it's a satire of the publishing industry, a satire of liberal racial guilt, a satire of Hollywood, a character study, a family drama, and a dysfunctional family comedy. Some of these things it does well. Most of these things it does less well. But because it even dares to try, it's worth seeing.

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a literature professor who doesn't suffer fools (especially student fools) gladly, and an author who doesn't know how to write a commercial hit. The movie begins from the assumption that the only kind of book worth writing is a successful one, which means, in its world view, Monk is eminently unsuccessful.

Whether this is, in point of fact, true is not something American Fiction wants to consider. Monk's books are sold at retail chain stores (in the "African-American Studies" section because, well, he's African-American), but because they are serious, literary books, the movie takes it as a truth that Monk is a failure. He's also deeply introverted, and stand-offish with his family. So, the story packs him up and sends him off to Boston to be with his family—his aging, declining mother (a delightful Leslie Uggams), his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), and their live-in housekeeper Lorraine. For surprising reasons, they're soon joined by his newly uncloseted brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown).

Frustrated by the crass success of another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), Monk impulsively writes a ridiculous, grotesque parody of a "Black novel," which becomes a massive success. In one of the movie's weirder conceits, Monk decides not to tell anyone at all about his—not his family, and not Coraline (Erika Alexander), the beautiful woman across the street. Monk finds himself pretending to be the made-up ex-con author, and wackiness ensues.

Or should. But American Fiction isn't a door-slamming farce, or a parody of mistaken identity, or an incensed and ironic view of a broken publishing industry. It plays a surprising amount of the comedy straight, and is at its best when it focuses on the convoluted home life Monk finds in his family's beach house. The family is filled with memorable, well-drawn characters. They are the best parts of American Fiction.

But the film thinks the best parts are the satirical ones. Alas, they're neither quite funny nor scabrous enough to be incisive. Mostly, they're pretty toothless and obvious, which doesn't mean they're not entertaining—just surprisingly mild and inoffensive. The targets are the obvious ones.

As Monk, Jeffrey Wright always strikes the best hangdog balance between comedy and pathos, but as the film nears a tenuous, contrived ending, he is not enough. The film falters under the weight of its setup, which is so very good. Too good. American Fiction is all beginning and middle, with no satisfactory end. It's never quite sure what it's trying to say, so in the end doesn't say too much we don't already know. But with characters and performers as charming as these, it's almost possible to forgive American Fiction its faults. Almost.

Viewed January 18, 2024 — Laemmle NoHo 7

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"Godzilla Minus One"

   ☆☆☆☆½ 

On my way out of the theater, I ran across a group of kids who had just seen Godzilla Minus One and were humming the pulsating, rhythmic theme music. "That was incredible," one said, to which another concurred, "I want to see it a third time."

And in that little moment, there's some sort of magic, I think.

The business pages say we live in a post-theatrical world, a time when streaming rules all with its incessant pipeline of indistinguishable content. There's every reason to imagine Godzilla Minus One would be right at home on a streaming service, where it could headline for a few days before being rotated into a carousel of "Recommended For You" content for people who like mindless entertainment.

But Godzilla Minus One is not mindless entertainment, and the studio behind it wisely decided it would be best experienced on the big screen—and, best of all, it turns out to be so good that kids, who are a demographic that allegedly doesn't go to movies anymore, not only turns out for it, but goes back to see it again. And again.

This is a movie that deserves such a happy fate, though Godzilla Minus One isn't, generally, a very happy movie. That's not to say it's not a rousing film or an almost ridiculously entertaining one; it's both, but it has some deep and often dark thoughts on its mind—so significant, really, that the only way it can convey these difficult observations about humans and politics and environmental disaster is by being a monster movie, through and through.

There have been a lot of Godzilla movies in the last 25 years, most of which have not been very good. This one comes from Toho, the studio that created Godzilla, and it treats the legacy and history and underlying meaning of its King of the Monsters with respect, even as it breathes new life into the giant old lizard with the sheer force of Godzilla's light ray.

It's the 37th Godzilla film but seems like the first, as it tells the story of Koihchi, a Japanese kamikaze pilot who cannot bring himself to die for the sake of his country. His decision is dishonorable, and fills him with guilt as, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of Japan lies in ruin. Fate brings Koichi together with Noriko, a young woman caring for Akiko, a baby left in her care. Koichi's trauma is made worse by having witnessed an attack by the mythical Godzilla—and when he discovers the monster not only didn't die but has grown to gargantuan proportions, he's helpless as Godzilla attacks and lays waste to an already suffering Tokyo.

It sounds dour and heavy, and it would be if it weren't for the sheer spectacle of it all. We may have grown up watching a man in a rubber suit stomp on miniature buildings, but we've also seen the true horrors of 9/11, so when a hyper-real Godzilla destroys this Tokyo, the results are shocking in scope and scale. Godzilla may be a movie monster, but the calamity is all too real.

So, then, is the heroism at the heart of the story, and the real suspense and tension that come with it. Godzilla Minus One is expertly made, not just equal to but far better than the hyperactive CG-driven action films Hollywood pumps out. It has real people with real consequences at its core, and as the characters in Godzilla Minus One race toward their showdown with the epic monster, something happens in this movie that never happens in mainstream films: Our hearts beat faster, we sit forward in our seats, and we actually cheer. The audience I saw Godzilla Minus One with actually burst into applause toward the end of the movie, a spontaneous show of emotion. It's the kind of thing we go to the movies for, and all too rarely get. Godzilla Minus One delivers it.

Viewed January 14, 2023 — AMC Universal 16

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