"Bridge of Spies"

 4.5 / 5 

Movies don't come more pedigreed these days than Bridge of Spies.  It's a Steven Spielberg film written by Joel and Ethan Coen, starring Tom Hanks.  Its poster depicts an earnest-looking Hanks wedged between the Stars and Stripes and the hammer and sickle with a tagline that touts that the movie will show the world what America stands for.

Ignore all that.

Bridge of Spies isn't the awards-season message movie that it might have you believe.  Instead, it's the closest Spielberg has come to matching the kind of filmmaking that labeled him a genius, a movie that seeks first and foremost to entertain, and to do it with sleek storytelling, luscious visuals and the kind of cinematic set-pieces that put him into the same league as Alfred Hitchcock.

This is the kind of film Hitchcock might have loved to have made, a movie that begins with an ordinary guy -- James Donovan, a high-priced lawyer, true, but one whose specialty is about as mundane as you can get: He represents insurance companies in accident claims.  He is that Hitchcokian "every man," a guy so non-descript you wouldn't look at him twice if you saw him on the train during his commute from Brooklyn.

There's another guy you wouldn't look at twice in Bridge of Spies.  His name is Rudolf Abel, and he's a Soviet spy.  He's supposed to be nondescript, and achieves his goal so well that even when the Feds run right into him during a chase, he tips his hat, apologizes and walks on his way.  They catch up to him, though, and Abel is arrested for spying.  It's 1957, and Cold War tensions are mounting.  The Soviets believe the U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack.  The Soviets believe the Americans are getting their nukes ready.  The world is at a standoff.

The capture of Abel (played with understated humor and dour resignation by Mark Rylance) could be a turning point.   Donovan's bosses want to follow the letter of the law, so they appoint Donovan to provide a "competent" defense of the accused.  The case against Abel has been decided even before he sets foot in the courtroom, and when the guilty verdict is handed down, Donovan uses his actuarial-table mind to make one last-ditch appeal to the judge.

It's a war, he reasons, and we've got one of theirs.  Sooner or later, they'll have one of ours, and when they do, we'll need their guy for leverage.

Later never happens, because Capt. Francis Gary Powers has been recruited for a top-secret spying mission (it's so much more polite to be called a "photo reconnaissance" mission), and he doesn't make it far.  He's captured by the Soviets.

Neither government can get involved.  And that's where Donovan comes in to play.  He's needed as the go-between, to negotiate with the enemy -- and a married father of three who has spent most of his days analyzing liability in car crashes finds himself playing a potentially deadly game of espionage in the war-torn no-man's-land of East Berlin.

His mission is to negotiate the release of Powers in exchange of the release of Abel.  They'll carry out the exchange on the Glienicke Bridge -- the Bridge of Spies.

Donovan doesn't really know how he got here.  The best he can do is talk and reason and negotiate with people who don't want to talk or reason or negotiate.  The government disavows knowledge of his activities (they're good at that, it seems) and he mostly on his own to figure it all out.

The stakes are high, and Spielberg does a masterful job of depicting Berlin in flux, as Communist Russia built its wall to keep "their" Germans from escaping to the free West.  It's a dangerous place in a dangerous world, and for long stretches Bridge of Spies takes on both the physical appearance and the pacing of a 1940s noir thriller, played halfway in light with exquisitely long two shots that allow the two sides to go head to head on screen.

Spielberg brings many of his signature visual touches to Bridge of Spies, but those compositions, framings and shots only enhance the film -- they don't detract the way they have in movies like Minority Report and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, when Spielberg seemed to be mimicking himself.

Here, he finds new life in his classic style, and the movie benefits.  Bridge of Spies tells a massive story, spanning half the globe at times, and Spielberg's unmatched expertise keeps it simultaneously contained moving forward at a brisk speed, keeping the tension high with the confidence of a true master.

There's a lot of exposition at the start, and even throughout, but it's never dull and it's all important (except, perhaps, for a couple of odd scenes played mostly for laughs, like one involving Abel's alleged family).  There's hardly an ounce of fat on the movie, and because Spielberg knows exactly what he's doing, watching Bridge of Spies really is like watching a master craftsman at work, blending his scenes; counterbalancing intensity with softness; knowing exactly when to ratchet up the tension and when to let it go slack for just a moment.  The result is free from excess, yet not so lean as to be tasteless -- it sizzles and crackles and all looks and feels exactly right.

Save a few extraneous, softly patriotic scenes at the end, Bridge of Spies is also not a movie trying to make a grand political statement, or even to warm our hearts -- it wants to engage our minds, and thrill us the way a good thriller should, by getting our brains working.

Bridge of Spies is Spielberg's best movie since his 1994 one-two punch of Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.  He's made some fine films since then, and some that were, generously, less successful.  But Bridge of Spies is a solid reminder, as if we ever really needed one, that when Steven Spielberg is at his best, there is no American director finer, more solidly in control of his craft.

Bridge of Spies a great spy thriller, a tense drama, a fascinating historical story.  More than all those things, though, and most importantly for moviegoers in need of solid entertainment, it's one truly terrific film.

Viewed Oct. 12, 2015 -- DGA Theater

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"The Martian"

 4 / 5 

The Martian taps into a deep need to feel good about human achievement.  We live in mean, sarcastic, pessimistic times, but there's not a mean, sarcastic or pessimistic moment in the movie, which is bent on reminding us of the virtues of stick-to-it-iveness, perseverance and (scientific) creativity.

It wouldn't at all be surprising to hear astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, burst into song, like Yankee Doodle Dandy on Mars.  The movie pulls off this cheery optimism so well that there's really no point in finding fault.  The Martian works, and it works well, even though it lacks a little bit of passion and zest, and you have to wonder if, except for one moment when he bangs on the steering wheel of his high-tech rover, Watney ever feels downright angry about being the only guy on an entire planet.

Andy Weir's novel, on which it's based, is itself the sort of man-against-the-machine story that the movie tells; when no one wanted to publish his novel, Weir did it himself, to great success.  The movie had no such problems, and in some ways it feels a little too worked-on and too polished.  It could have used some of Weir's nerdish ambition and roughness.

Still, for all the seen-it-all grumbling that a middle-aged moviegoer can bring to it, The Martian works.  It puts a grin on your face and a tear in your eye, and that's due in no small part to Damon's darn-it-all pluckiness.  Sure, he drops the F-bomb a few times, but so did John Glenn in The Right Stuff.

Watney is one of six crew members on a mission to Mars that gets caught up in a big storm.  He's injured and, when his fellow explorers skedaddle out of the way (and off the planet), he's left behind and presumed dead.  Except he's not.

Occasionally, during the movie's 2½-hour running time, which never feels long or excessive, those other astronauts show up, and the story weaves in the saga of NASA and JPL scientists back on the Earth trying to figure out a way to rescue him.

Neither the movie nor the book ever questions whether Watney should be saved, whether that's the right use of resources and time -- though, in one of the few scenes that isn't driven by urgent action, Watney himself acknowledges that if he dies it's for a greater good.  Even though it's all told in voice-over, with Damon offering faraway, wistful looks through his space helmet, it's one of the best moments in the movie, one of the few times The Martian pauses to consider the (pardon the cinematic pun) gravity of the situation.

Largely, The Martian is a grand and elaborate procedural, depicting with some impressive believability how a guy could make it on his own some 34 million miles away.  On that point, the movie says Mars is 50 million miles away, the movie's tagline says it's 140 million miles away; I know it's all a matter of space and physics and things I don't even pretend to understand, but it's also a good example of the sort of stuff the movie doesn't take the time to explain.

Alone in his Martian hab, the novel's version of Watney had nothing but time to explain almost everything to readers of The Martian.  Want to know just how and why vacuum-packed poop can be mixed with Martian soil to grow potatoes?  How to make water when none exists?  How to properly wrap some plutonium to turn it into a heating source?  It's all there in the book, and then some.  You know exactly what he's doing and why, even if the math goes over your head.

I got a C in biology and a C-minus in chemistry, so I was mostly lost while reading the book -- but once I got the hang of it, I found Watney's ingenious solutions to be fascinating.  Weir may be a relatively simple writer, but he possesses a remarkable gift for filtering incredibly complex concepts down to a level that people like me can understand them.

Many of the same moments happen in the movie version, but they lack the explicit descriptions. The movie shows what Weir could only write about, and offers little if any explanation why or how things are being done.  That decision by director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard keeps things moving, no doubt, but in trade we lose a little of the key moments that made Mark feel genuine: when his efforts failed, when even he didn't understand what he was trying to do, when he was trying to wrap his big brain around an impossible problem.

Those helpless but hopeful moves made the book work despite the scientific inaccessibility for many mainstream readers.  The big, exciting set pieces were less well realized in print.

On screen, The Martian combines the best of both worlds -- and may actually be enjoyed most fully by both seeing the movie and reading the book.

Nonethless, the movie does stand alone.  It is less a glorification of science and intelligence than it is a fantastic adventure movie, a grand and altogether fulfilling epic, and at its core is a smart, fully realized, downright Everyman-style hero in Mark Watney.  The final 20 minutes of the movie are particularly superb, when the crew that abandoned him returns and gets as close to him as they're ever going to get.  They're riveting.  They're completely believable.  And they get to the heart of what makes The Martian work so well: We've never seen this movie before.  It's really something new.

And that, more than anything else, makes The Martian succeed beyond its flaws.  It's helped further by a touching coda in which Watney tries to explain to some young kids what it means to be in crisis, how the point of it (and, hence, he seems to be saying, the point of life) is to just get through one problem at a time.  There are going to be others. Fix this one.  Then worry about the next.

The Martian gives us a story that feels new, combines it with a messages of hope and optimism, of determination and the refusal to accept failure.  So, while it might not be a perfect movie (when does Jessica Chastain have time to style her hair in space, is one of the distractions I had while watching it; did Kristin Wiig know she was getting six lines when she signed up for this?), it's a darn good movie. A fun movie.  A movie that reminds us that good people doing good things will make life good for everyone.

There's nothing at all wrong with that.  If we could find the same renewed sense of hope and ambition by flying ourselves 50 million miles -- or 34 or 140 or whatever -- to Mars, I'd be all for it.  The Martian left me feeling good, feeling that maybe if and when we get into another crisis, we'll know how to get out of it.  Or at least we'll figure out the way.  As long, that is, as there's a guy like Mark Watney around.

Mostly, The Martian made me think of that old tagline from That's Entertainment! in the 1970s: "Boy, do we need it now."  The Martian is, unexpectedly, exactly the movie we need now.



Viewed Oct. 11, 2015 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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"Sicario"

 5 / 5 

Sicario opens with a scene of deeply unsettling intensity, then refuses to let up.  It's a movie of startling complexity, violence and disillusionment, an angry and cynical movie that marries story, acting, image and sound with assured command.  It's hard to imagine there will be a better or more bracingly original movie this year.

The opening scene takes place in suburban Phoenix.  FBI agents are raiding a tract home.  What they find there defies logic and humanity.  Nothing could be worse than what they see.  Except, things get worse.

One of the FBI agents is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who is tough as nails and battle ready.  Or so she thinks.  Her bosses are so impressed by her ability to keep her head about her in the chaos and carnage of what happens in that house that they single her out for a new assignment.

She doesn't understand what it is, only that it involves a massive drug cartel that is responsible for the mayhem, which kills two of her co-workers.  Loyal to a fault, with a strong need for vengeance, she doesn't hesitate to volunteer for the assignment, though she isn't entirely clear why her partner, Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya), is excluded from selection, or why  her FBI boss (Victor Garber) or the other senior-level government agent in the room (Josh Brolin) seem so cavalier about the proceedings -- Brolin's character wears flip-flops instead of a suit and tie.

Kate hasn't had a chance to think about any of this before she's whisked off to an Air Force Base and taken on board a private jet to fly, she thinks, to El Paso.  That's not where they're heading.  They're going south of the border, flying over the chain-link fence that separates the U.S. from Mexico, and they're going to find Guillermo, the man responsible for what happened in Arizona.

But Kate has her doubts.  Just one man couldn't do all that -- and she's right.  They want to cut the head off the monster, and they know that in the drug world, a mythological creature like the Hydra still exists -- once they take down Guillermo, more heads will pop up in unexpected locations.

This is a war.  Call it the "war on drugs" if you want, but it doesn't involve Nancy Reagan and Barack Obama spouting homilies or SWAT teams invading homes in the Hollywood Hills.  This is military-grade war, and on more than one occasion Kate reminds Matt Graver (Brolin), the man without a department -- or maybe with too many departments -- that she doesn't have to do this.

But she will, of course.  She's too far in now.  Down in Ciudad Juarez, they extricate Guillermo, and just as they're all about to get away, the border checkpoint erupts in gunfire.  Kate's killing people.  People she doesn't know.  For a project she's not sure about.

And like this, Sicario just keeps moving forward, occasionally pausing for some observations by Alejndro (Matt's partner, played by Benecio del Toro), which just seem to get more and more ominous.

Surveillance and some really questionable torture techniques have uncovered a tunnel between the U.S and Mexico, and they're going to go in it and see where it leads them.  It won't be anyplace good, for sure.

Kate, particularly, takes a wrong turn in one of those tunnels and in an instant she sees the true plan being executed by someone she thought was an ally.  She is alone, has no idea what to do about this information, no one to report it to.  Just how corrupt is the group assigned to prevent corruption?  Just how drug-addled its the group assigned to prevent drugs from entering the United States?  Kate begins to find out the answers to those questions.

Kate finds every moral compass she's ever used fluctuating wildly.  Here in the netherworld between America and Mexico, between murder and death, between diplomacy and destruction, the compass only spins wildly out of control.

Throughout most of Sicario, even the most astute audiences will be perplexed.  With rare exceptions, we know only as much as Kate knows, which isn't a lot -- but by the time the movie ends it will be more than we care to know.

Sicario is a movie that plays right into Donald Trump's worst nightmares of life in Mexico; he could well use this movie as a political ad.  But it's not at all a political thriller.  It's a hard-hearted, cold-faced crime-thriller that bears the hallmarks of a lot of time spent by its French-Canadian director, Dennis Villeneuve, researching just how crazily off the rails the "good guys" have careened to reach the bad ones. Its nearest cinematic cousin can be found in the off-putting, chaos-on-a-hot-night depravity of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, but Sicario might well be even more assured and finely crafted than that masterpiece.

Propelled by a pulsating, visceral score by Jóhan Jóhannson, which infuses every moment with dread, Sicario refuses to let its intensity flag even through the final few minutes, a terrifying, nail-biting scene between Kate and one of the men she thought she could trust.

Kate is a modern-day Clarice Starling, sure that her calm demeanor and fierce intelligence will propel her to safety just like it always had.  Sicario offers this observation: An FBI agent against a single serial murderer was a cake-walk compared to what's going on here, when the good guys fight even dirtier, with even less humanity, than the "bad" ones.

Sicario is a remarkable movie.  I went into it serenely unaware of to expect -- and left both energized by a genuinely great film and yet feeling some of Kate's numb hopelessness, resigned to the reality of what happens when 20% of the population still wants these drugs and wants them now, and will tacitly fund and support these horrors as long as they get their fix.  The movie doesn't make a big point of preaching; it just insists on telling its labyrinthine story at full speed and with unflinching calm.

By subsuming the trappings of an old western (lots of gruff older men, Texas twangs, flat and bleached-out vistas of the uncompromising desert), Sicario creates something urgent and new: a crime drama that can't quite get us to figure out who exactly is the bad guy (at least, not thematically).  Sicario dares you to think to fill in the blanks and make the conncetions yourself -- because the bad guy may not be so bad, or he may be the devil himself.  There's really no way to know, and there's no time to care, because the drugs just keep flowing and flowing and flowing.  No way to stop them.  No time to stop trying.  No matter the casualties along the way.

Impossibly tense, meticulously crafted, with enough quiet spaces to give you just a moment to think about what's gone before, Sicario succeeds on every level.  It's one of the very best movies of the year.



Viewed Oct. 3, 2015 - Pacific The Grove

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Catching Up: "Boulevard"

 3.5 / 5 

Boulevard is the final dramatic film starring Robin Williams, and it's an unexpectedly fitting bookend for an film acting career that began with the sprawling, messy, whimsical, wonderful epic The World According to Garp in 1982.

That movie explored the idea that life is an unpredictable adventure, that nothing is more important than personal (and sexual) liberty.  It was big, bold and loud.

Boulevard is small, meek and quiet.  It explores the idea that most people don't know what their lives are about.  Garp was an ambitious novel.  Boulevard is a modest short story.  As Garp, Williams was exuberant.  As Boulevard's humble banker Nolan Mack, Williams is so restrained he seems to be in pain -- which is exactly the movie's point.

Boulevard begins by showing us Nolan's little life.  He lives with his wife of who-knows-how-long, a perfectly lovely and fiercely intelligent woman with the ironic name Joy, who's played by the always-spot-on Kathy Baker, one of those actresses you've seen a hundred times, never quite in the same way.

Nolan works in a bank.  He likes the people who come to him for money.  If he seems just a little jealous of his latest clients, a gay couple buying a home, it's because he is.  Nolan, we come to find, has known of his own homosexuality since he was 12.  That knowledge hasn't changed the course of his life -- he got a degree, took a job, took a wife, bought a house, very probably in that order.  Now, he and his wife sleep in separate rooms.  "Separate beds, separate rooms, separate lives," she says to him one night, not in anger.  "How much more separate can we be?"

A lot, it seems.  Nolan's wife does not accompany him to the hospital, where his father is dying.  No doubt, he has told her not to bother herself.  So, she's not driving with him the night he maneuvers the car through the seedy part of town, where the hookers line up.

By mistake, he nearly hits one of them, but it's not a movie meet-cute moment.  It's just one of those moments in life that leads to another, and another, and another, and pretty soon Nolan's life is moving down roads he didn't know existed.

The hooker's name is Leo.  He's played by Robert Aguire in a performance noteworthy for the way he brings simultaneous clarity and confusion.  Leo is as unaware of a world outside his own as Nolan is. Nolan is captivated by the younger man.  He begins to have a sort of affair, but it's been so long since Nolan experienced what Garp's Jenny Fields would call "lust," he has no idea how to begin.

Nolan becomes infatuated with Leo.  He can't bring himself to admit that he's in love with a prostitute; it's not the sex-for-money part that stuns him -- it's the love part.

His wife suspects.  But, then, his wife has probably suspected a lot of things about Nolan, maybe even about herself.  Boulevard is filled with people who have talked themselves into their lives.

By and large, Boulevard is a quiet, clearly examined character study.  Only toward the very end does it generate some much-needed drama in a brief but memorable scene in which Joy finally asks Nolan to explain himself.  He can't, so she does it for him.  It's a scene of undeniable power, well-written and ferociously acted, and can be compared favorably to the short-but-mighty scene in Network for which Beatrice Straight won the Academy Award.  Joy lets loose on her husband, but not in the way, or with the conclusions, you might imagine.  The one scene of great drama in Boulevard does not betray the bottled-up, repressed emotions of the rest of the film -- though it does expand on them.

Williams, in turn, brings a scared hesitancy to Nolan, a man who now knows what direction he's moving -- whether he likes it or not.

In its final moments, Boulevard tries too hard for a happy end to this unhappy domestic drama.  It's nice to imagine that Nolan will find himself, that Joy will be resilient, but Boulevard insists on showing this moment of optimism.  But it's less effective than it might be, because Boulevard begins with grown-up characters realizing they still have a lot to learn about life.  The learning will go on for a long time, can't be tacked on by a happy coda that makes Nolan and Joy both look a little too much like Mary Tyler Moore about to throw her hat in the air.

Hat tosses aren't needed in Boulevard.  It's a movie that supposes a kiss between an estranged husband and wife can be just as valid as a kiss between two men who aren't sure yet whether they're in love, or whether they ever will be.  They're kisses stolen in the moments between emotion, and those are the moments Boulevard is best at exploring.


Viewed Sept. 27, 2015 -- On Demand

9 p.m.

"The Visit"

 3.5 / 5 

The Visit begins with a situation that must be universally uncomfortable: Staying at the house of a friend or relative for the first time, it dawns on you that you don't really know them all that well.  The lights go out at bedtime, and you start to hear noises, maybe some whispers.  Those nocturnal activities that are normal for your host can be disquieting to you.

That's the situation teenagers Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) find themselves in as they start on a weeklong visit to the home of their estranged grandparents.  It seems their mom (Kathryn Hahn) had a falling out with her parents long before the kids were born, but Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) want to meet their flesh and blood at long last, and to see the house where Mom grew up.

The timing works.  Mom's about to head off on a Caribbean beach cruise with her new boyfriend, so the offer of a week in the cold, snowy woods of central Pennsylvania seems perfectly timed.

Off they go, Becca, a budding filmmaker, with a camera in her hand -- she senses that there may be reparations to be made during the visit, and she's certain that the healing of multiple generations of one family could make a terrific documentary.  Her 14-year-old brother may be less helpful, but he's still intrigued by the idea, especially if it gives him time to rap on camera.

It's dull out there in rural Pennsylvania, but Nana and Pop Pop plan to do their best to show the kids a good time during the Monday-through-Saturday stay.  Really, there aren't even all that many rules in the house -- just two, actually: After 9:30 p.m., stay in bed. Don't open the door, no matter what you might hear.  Don't go snooping around the house at night.  And don't head down into the basement.

If they sound a little like the warnings Billy Peltzer was given in Gremlins, that's not entirely unintentional, as The Visit blends humor with scares for a result that feels very much like that earlier film.  Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan never seems to take any of it too seriously (unlike his deadly dull "thrillers" The Village and The Happening), and the mostly teen-aged audience I saw it with seemed to be having a blast, spending far more time laughing than screaming.

The Visit isn't as much a scare-fest as it is a mystery tinged with thrills.  It becomes clear pretty much right away that there's something very off about Nana and Pop Pop, and Shyamalan has both the guts and the filmmaking prowess to set one of the movie's earliest squirm-inducing moments in the middle of the day, as the kids discover Mom's old hide-and-seek spot.

But what is going on, exactly?  Are Nana and Pop Pop just, as they insist, getting old?  If it's as simple as that, how come the goings-on are increasingly disturbing?  And why is it that when Nana spilled some biscuit batter on Becca's computer, it only damaged the camera?  It makes for some pretty one-sided video chats with Mom out there on that cruise ship, but she reassures the kids that her parents were hippies -- that should explain everything.

As the days progress (each day is flashed on screen in huge letters, an homage to Kubrick's The Shining, another move about being stuck with unreliable parental figures), the kids are increasingly disturbed, and committed to getting to the bottom of things.

The Visit is a compact little film, clocking in at just over an hour and a half, but as with most Shyamalan films things don't always move with haste.  Despite the brevity, The Visit repeats itself frequently, while managing to bury some of the most salient clues.  When the final solution is revealed (it's a Shyamalan film, of course there's a "twist"), it's less of an "a-ha" moment than a jolt; sure, it makes sense, but there's no way we should've seen it coming if only we had been more attentive.

The movie's four central performers go a long way to offsetting the movie's minor flaws, most particularly DeJonge and Oxenbould.  They make a tired old device like "found footage" seem fresh and interesting, and they bring welcome dimension and depth to characters that are surprisingly well-rounded.  It's rare indeed to find a thriller works as a character study, but this one almost does.

What The Visit lacks in scares it makes up for in chills, and it compensates for some groan-inducing moments with humor and flair.  The Visit is in keeping with Shyamalan's pernicious little Devil, and might not qualify as one of his major works; but given the quality of his "major" works since The Sixth Sense, perhaps that's for the best.



Viewed Sept. 12, 2015 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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Catching Up: "The Overnight"

 1.5 / 5 

For a movie that has very little on its mind except penises, pot and boobies, The Overnight is remarkably dull.

A half-century after Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, here's another film about the sexual curiosity of long-married couples.  The Overnight seems to think it's on to something new and slightly naughty by revealing that people who have been married for a long time might have sexual desires beyond the confines of matrimony.  It titters and tee-hees at sexual proclivities, and seems almost embarrassed by the truths it's trying to reveal.

The Overnight stars Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling as a nice little couple from Seattle who move with their toddler to a tiny little apartment in Los Angeles.  The movie's writer and director, Patrick Bice, apparently thinks Seattle is the new Sheboygan, because there's rarely been a more square, more awkward, less sophisticated couple of people to come to L.A.  They're as sweet as can be, and, golly-gosh, they are just so excited to make friends when the mildly creepy Jason Schwartzman, wearing a nouveau-Hasidic hat, comes up to them in the park one fine afternoon.

Soon enough, they're having dinner with the weird, rich Schwartzman character and his French wife, while their sons play upstairs.  They put the kids to bed.  Then things get progressively weirder.

Schwartzman shows Scott the wacko pictures he paints in his studio.  They're human sphincters, ha ha, and Scott thinks they're golly-gosh interesting.  Stoned and drunk, Schwartzman talks Scott into taking his clothes off for some pictures, while the wives talk dirty to each other in another part of the house.  Before you know it, they're skinny dipping.

This is the big moment for The Overnight: The men take off their clothes, and the film seems to build and build with frenzied excitement as it prepares to show us ... penises!  Oh, the movie loves its penises, and seems downright gleeful to reveal that both actors are wearing prosthetic penises, which look like something designed by someone who's never really seen a penis.  Boy, this movie spends a lot of time talking about penises -- a lot of time.  Really, an unbelievable amount of time.

The Overnight has a prurient, slightly worrisome view of sex, which it presents as something to be embarrassed and ashamed about.  Watching the movie is like listening to some junior-high boys talk about breasts and dicks and all the things they imagine they're going to do when they get older.

What The Overnight fails to do is offer any insight -- comedic, dramatic or otherwise -- into the lives of its characters.  The actors seem genuinely committed to the concept, and they're all engaging enough, but there's nothing to do except read the lines.  The whole thing is only slightly better than watching a self-funded play in a tiny Melrose Avenue theater.  It's uncomfortable, slightly embarrassing, and even though it only lasts 79 minutes, it's as irritatingly endless as the night it depicts.



Viewed Sept. 11, 2015 -- Amazon Instant Video

Catching Up: "Poltergeist" (2015)

 1 / 5 

The 1982 mini-classic Poltergeist opened with an extreme close-up of a television screen as a channel signed off for the night and the picture faded into noisy snow.  The ghosts in Poltergeist used this video snow as a way to communicate between the spirit world and the real world, and they latched on to a little girl named Carol Anne, who they wanted to help lead them out of purgatory.

It was a convoluted story, but it worked because of the skill of its filmmakers (the director, at least minimally, was Tobe Hooper, but it was executive producer Steven Spielberg whose creative fingerprints were all over the film, released just a week before E.T. the Extra-Terresrial.  The two movies were bookends that offered a fantastical look at just what secrets and oddities lurked behind the normalcy of American tract homes.

The 32-years-on remake of Poltergeist (thankfully, no one has touched E.T. ... yet) also begins on an extreme close-up of a video screen.  It's not because the ghosts are going to use this particular screen as their point of entry. In fact, the video screen seen in the first shot of this movie never factors into the story again.

The filmmakers do it because the original movie did it.  All throughout the 93 execrable minutes of Poltergeist, elements from the first movie keep reappearing, no matter how little sense they make.  There's a malevolent clown doll, for instance. But what 10-year-old boy owns a creepy clown doll?  None.  So the filmmakers have to figure out a way to bring that into their version.  There's a big tree outside of the house, too, because there was a big tree in the first film.  Yes, it attacks.  No, it's not scary or creepy or even (as in the first film) lyrically malicious.

And when it attacks, during a freak storm, little Carol Anne -- here renamed Maddie, because, well, I don't know -- will go into the closet, which has already been set up as a spooky place.  If she didn't go into the closet, there would be no movie, since the filmmakers behind this version of Poltergeist can't really do anything different or unique, except make inexplicable changes like renaming Carol Anne Maddie.  So, yeah, back to the closet.

Poltergeist a lumbering, gloomy movie, resembling the first one in the way a paint-by-numbers kit resembles the Sistine Chapel.  There's some vague sense that maybe they're trying to replicate the original by copying it, but they're using cheap dime-store paint and the colors aren't even right.

There's none of the spark of the original.  The family is angry and sullen, dad is an unemployed wimp, mom is a non-entity, the little boy is neurotic, Carol Anne/Maddie is a forgettable plot device.  The silliness of having a little tiny psychic with a beehive hairdo figure everything out is replaced with a middle-aged British reality TV loony wearing a porkpie hat.  I don't know who thought these were the changes that needed to be made to update Poltergeist into the 21st century, but the changes stink.  They're listless, lazy ideas that suck the life right out of the underlying concept.

Back in 1982, Poltergeist was a romp, a blend of comedy, horror and over-the-top visual effects, tied together with appealing actors and a memorable Jerry Goldsmith score.

The new Poltergeist just proves that you can't go back again. It's a tired, bitter, strangely angry movie (dad is unemployed, the house is no longer a gleaming tract home but a run-down, slightly squalid place) that proves just how rampant cynicism is in Hollywood.  Poltergeist has had every trace of fun removed from it.  Every time the movie's score hints just slightly at a few notes of Goldsmith's theme, every time Rosemarie DeWitt as the mom repeats one of Jobeth Williams' lines, every time the movie tries to offer a knowing nod at the first film, everything just feels even worse.

Poltergeist is the cinematic equivalent of that dirty, stained-up Spider-Man on Hollywood Boulevard. He's just a pudgy, grungy, odor-filled copy of the original, and by trying to imitate the original he's just embarrassing everyone.




Viewed Sept. 7, 2015 -- Virgin Atlantic