"RBG"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Compare the straightforward, sober-minded yet still playful approach that a documentary like RBG takes compared with the wild-eyed, manufactured hysteria of Dinesh D'Souza's Obama's 2016, which remains one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time.

It's worth doing, since unlike that conservative fever dream of weird reenactments, breathless, conspiratorial narration, and lack of factual material, RBG is a production of CNN, but could be accused of taking a slanted view of the country's most visible Supreme Court justice.

Slackjawed and bemused, I've watched D'Souza's films, which can be termed as documentaries only in the loosest sense -- and while this is not intended to be a denunciation of those films, it's worth examining how the extreme right-wing ideology has trouble finding even a basic narrative that can be explored with real interviews that talk about actual events.

If RBG, an inspiring though lightweight new documentary by directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, has a fault its that it is a little too straightforward -- D'Souza made bold claims, like saying that Democrats "plan to steal America." RBG has slightly less lofty claims: at no time does it accuse "the thieves" of "wanting to own you," it merely wants to show the arc of a woman who went from being a "barely second-generation" daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants to sitting on the most important legal panel in the country, if not the world.

The story of Bader's early life begins a theme that is never far from the narrative of RBG: This is an indefatigable woman who is inherently incapable of slowing down. It's both fun and mildly alarming to hear her own family marvel at the way that Bader Ginsburg managed to go to law school, find time to play with her young daughter and -- the real kicker -- help her husband successfully fight cancer.

And through it all, Bader Ginsburg did something both entirely mundane and thoroughly life-changing: She took a back seat to her husband, who recovered from his illness, took a job in New York -- and led her to have to change schools mid-way through achieving her law degree.

All of this is told with the traditional (but effective) tools of professional documentarians: interviews, archival footage and photographs, and memories from the subject.  There are no attempts to reenact either Ginsburg's life or the conflicts of the day, no need to revise history to make it fit the narrative: RGB just tells us the story as it happened.

And it's quite a story, nicely recounted by people who knew RBG during her early years and who were close to her as she struggled to find employment just as she had struggled to be taken seriously by the all-male law schools.  The "liberal bias" that exists in RBG comes in part from the slap-in-the-face shock of seeing just how deeply engrained and entirely quotidian gender bias was in the 1960s.

RBG makes no secret of the fact that RBG wanted to focus her career on gender-equality -- and that her ideology is unrepentantly liberal.  The film takes it as fact that every Supreme Court justice has a personal ideology, and takes a moment to talk about how the group tries to reach consensus.  It's this section of the film that feels the least fulfilling, though -- RBG is willing to show you a bit of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself works, but very little about how the Supreme Court operates. The closest we come is learning about the odd-couple friendship, which seemed sincere and genuine, between RBG and Antonin Scalia, but there's no deeper dive into finding out how they deal with their inherent disagreements during the critical decision-making period.

RBG is also not very much helped by its own subject.  As the movie repeatedly points out, she is a quiet woman who doesn't naturally seek the spotlight, soft-spoken even if firm of opinion. Over and over, we hear how unusual it is for a person of her stature to take such a back seat -- and yet, her brilliant arguments have been enough to change the hearts and minds of people who intensely disagree with her.

It's that talent of Ginsburg's that I hoped to learn more about, and if RBG doesn't show us quite enough of that, at the very least it also doesn't resort to producing low-budget re-enactments with community-theater-level actors.  Everything in RBG is designed to be a real documentary, produced by real journalists who have found a compelling -- if not entirely revelatory -- story.

It backs away from some of the toughest stuff, like finding out exactly what's on the mind of Ginsburg, who had toyed with the idea of retiring a few years ago but now seems, at least based on conventional wisdom, to have reason to stick it out as long as humanly possible.  How does that make her feel?  What are her thoughts on the direction that recent decisions have taken the court?

You're not going to find that in RBG. What you'll find instead is a story of a determined, resilient woman whose view of the Constitution is both shockingly simple and wonderfully direct -- she holds to her beliefs strongly, and isn't afraid to dissent, though I wish RBG had made a little bit more about what those dissents mean and why they matter so much.

Still, everything you see in the warm, uplifting, intriguing RBG is real, including the cult of personality that has grown up around her, particularly in the Trump era. She's a real woman with real foibles and, most importantly, real beliefs -- some of the most well-considered and committed beliefs of anyone in Washington. In RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will inspire you with her early story and charm you with her current views.  In other hands, this could have turned into an in-your-face "Notorious RBG" quasi-doc focused on her liberal dissents, but that would be the realm of other, less sophisticated filmmakers with hateful agenda to push.

At the least, RBG seems almost to have no point of view, other than giving us an in-depth glimpse into one of the century's most important legal minds. It may not be as breathless and as hysterical as it might have been (her story certainly gives it right to be), but that would have made it an entirely different documentary.

This one focuses on the facts -- yes, those pesky things. We may live in a "post-truth" world, but a movie like RBG reminds us not only that truth matters, but that truth and facts can be combined to make the kind of documentary that presents ideas, that explores humans, that tells us something good about what's happening in our world.  On that level, at the very least, if you're even mildly interested in politics RBG is a documentary that shouldn't be missed.




Viewed May 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 8

1615

"Isle of Dogs"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Is Isle of Dogs dissatisfying yet wonderful, or wonderful yet dissatisfying? I know it's both, but I can't figure out if one of those emotions matters more than the other.

Every frame of Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated film is filled with incredible marvels -- this is a film I'd love to see again just to look at it, but not for any sort of emotional satisfaction, because there is no real emotional satisfaction in this film.

Watching it is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation between two really smart, droll, witty people who know that they are smart, droll and witty and aren't even aware of how much posturing they're both doing, trying endlessly to outdo each other. You're sort of glad when they finally move across the room.

The film is the same way, starting out with a dazzling visual inventiveness that first seems extraordinary, then seems overwhelming, and finally is a little exhausting.

And yet, because stop-motion animation -- even in its simplest form -- is always astonishing to behold and kind of awesome to consider, Isle of Dogs is always visually breathtaking. Maybe I didn't latch on to the story because there's so much going on in each and every frame, and because knowing what I know of stop-motion animation I couldn't stop thinking about what went into making it.

In every movie, what you see up there on screen is there deliberately. In hand-drawn animation, that's even more true -- even the smallest touches require an artist to create them. In CG animation, the level of detail can be overwhelming. But in stop-motion animation, everything that is seen on screen -- every single item, even the smallest of the small, has to be physically crafted by hand.

As if that weren't enough, all of it needs to be photographed a single frame at a time, with tiny changes in between each individual image. So, as those images flew past my eyes at 24 frames per second (that is, 24 individual moments with 24 minute variations), I kept thinking of just how little my eye was actually taking in, just how much work some people put into even one of those frames all so most of it could go unnoticed.

One tiny little prop in particular stood out: my eye latched on to a dog biscuit. In the plot of the film, the biscuit is kept zipped up in the silver flight suit worn by a boy named Atari.  Like many of the humans in the film, Atari speaks only Japanese, while all of the dogs in the movie speak English (which the film notes up front has been translated from barks by a panoply of interpreters).  The story takes place in the future, on a Japanese island city where dogs have come down with terrible illnesses, and an unscrupulous politician has turned human sentiment against all canines -- so much so that everyone thinks it's a great idea to scoop up all dogs and ship them off to Trash Island, where they won't be a health threat.

Akira is the ward of the ugly politician, who has some very, uh, shall we say, populist and isolationist views. The first dog to be taken to Trash Island is the politician's own dog, Spots, who has been a loyal bodyguard and companion to Akira.  So Akira steals an airplane, flies it to Trash Island, and goes looking for Spots.

Along the way, he meets a number of dogs, none of whom can understand the language Atari speaks, while he can't understand them, so everyone kind of does their best to try to sort out their intentions, which is in a lot of ways what all of us are doing every single day.

All the dogs on the Isle of Dogs mostly work together, though they are led by a dog named Chief, whose most significant trait is that he doesn't want to be a leader. They all help Akira look for Spots, who may be dead -- or may be the stuff of legend.

The plot goes in lots of different directions as back in Megasaki City an American foreign-exchange student develops a weird crush on Atari, while there's a lot of political intrigue -- and even a sinister assassination -- and, simultaneously, Atari, Chief, and dogs like Rex, King and Boss help Atari track down Spots.  The plot becomes incredibly complex, far more than is needed, but Wes Anderson films tend to like to have a lot of fancy, intriguing moving parts, even if most of them, like some old Victorian machine, don't actually do anything.

In a live-action film, that can be wearying, and indeed that's what I often find to be the case with Anderson's movies, but with Isle of Dogs it doesn't really matter much.  I may have lost (and later picked up) some of the strands of the plot, but it was only because my eyes were so wide looking at the movie.

It's an auditory marvel, too, with voices like Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton and many, many other ultra-hip actors saying ultra-hip things (my favorite credit is the one for Anjelica Huston as "Mute Poodle"), which makes the act of listening to Isle of Dogs like hearing the best NPR radio play ever.

But none of that -- not the plot, not the actors -- really matters when there's so much to look at, like that dog biscuit.

It shows up on screen for about six seconds, all told, roughly the amount of time it takes for Atari to remove it from his pocket, break it in half and put it in a dog's mouth. What made me focus on it is that the dog biscuit is designed to look just like a real dog biscuit would: it's rough and uneven, with the name of the dog biscuit company imprinted on it, and it looks like it was rolled out by hand and baked in an oven.

But it wasn't. Someone had to design it, and figure out how it would look and what color it would be, and what the texture would be like, and decide the name of the company that makes it, and how big it should be, and how it should sit in the hand of the little boy, and then how it would crunch when it gets to the dog's mouth.

There are greater, much more impressive sights to behold in Isle of Dogs (the dogs and Atari all take an aerial tram trip that is glorious) but I got fixated on the dog biscuit, and while I can't remember too much of the plot, and while I didn't much care what happened to the characters in the movie, I was struck by how much time, effort and care went into that one little prop -- and by how simultaneously unsatisfying and richly rewarding this movie is. It's a strange movie, but in this case, strange is sometimes pretty wonderful.



Viewed May 12, 2018 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5

1615

"Black Panther"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Long after the rest of the world, I finally saw Black Panther today, and I find myself understanding why it has been such a big hit yet more frustrated than ever at the Marvel "cinematic universe," which dictates that every story be engineered to fit into every other story.

Why?

There's no denying the popularity of the conceit and on some level it's impossible not to be impressed by the level of detail that each film contains, filled with references to other films and stories, careful to ensure that all the pieces of the puzzle interlock with each other just so.

And yet, if ever there were a Marvel film -- or a comic-book film of any sort -- deserving to stand on its own, this is the one, and not just because its characters look and sound different from the handsome caucasian casts of the other films but because its story is so well-conceived that it's a shame it isn't something created to be appreciated and viewed entirely on its own.

But it's not, it's part of the bigger Marvel world, which still confounds me because it's like watching Singin' in the Rain and being distracted by references to Dorothy and Kansas, or watching Cinderella and being on the lookout for the cameos by Sneezy and Pinocchio. Why does this trouble me so much? I'm hard-pressed to explain it, though I'm aware that I'm maybe the only person it bothers.

It's an unnecessary distraction in the case of Black Panther, but then as much as I liked the film, which was significantly more than I imagined, that kind of detail causes my mind to wander in Marvel films more than it does in most. Some of the thoughts and questions that ran through my mind while watching Black Panther:

• *The big car-chase set piece sure seems to belong to another film; the middle third of Black Panther was the least interesting to me by far -- do we really need more cars and guns and chases?
• For movies about heroes who save the world, Black Panther follows in the same footsteps as other Marvel films: it's overwhelmingly, almost distressingly, violent; is it any wonder we're living in such violent times when every character in these movies is armed to the teeth?
• At least here in L.A. where I live, slow-speed, single-car police chases merit live broadcasts by every TV station in town; how is it possible that massive, spectacular car chases featuring super heroes wearing impermeable material and cars that appear and disappear seemingly go unnoticed by the larger world?
• The bad guy in Black Panther turns out to be named "Eric," which I know must have come from the comics but struck me as almost giggle-worthy -- "Eric" is such a wholesome name for a super villain, isn't it?
• To the point about the car chases, there's a key scene in which Eric and the other bad guy, Claw (whose name turns out to be spelled "Klaue"), break in to a big museum in London and abscond with an important artifact -- they even kill several people in the museum. Wouldn't that attract an awfully big amount of attention in today's world?  Wouldn't there be about 45 news helicopters flying over the building before they even had a chance to escape?
• The country of Wakanda is apparently invisible, but it's filled with gigantic skyscrapers and wide-open vistas; wouldn't Google Earth have picked up on that by now?
• The Wakandan underground scientific facilities are so ultra-modern that it's curious the streets of the country remain unpaved -- I genuinely wanted to know more about the history of this fictional country, and think the film really missed a bet by reverting to fight scenes and car chases.
• The king of Wakanda is named T'Challa, which is a fantastic name; but the villain is still stuck with "Eric"?  (I know, I know, it's just going off of the comics, but imagine if Luke Skywalker's fearsome nemesis was named "Steve"?)
• The fight scene between T'Challa and Eric (who, finally, adopts his Wakandan name N'Jakada, though I found it hard to think of him as anything but "Eric") atop a towering waterfall is maybe the first action scene in a Marvel movie that has gotten me emotionally invested; it's a great scene, even though it's cut in such a hyperkinetic way -- I miss the days when fights were carefully choreographed and shot in one long take.
• One of the Wakandan tribes lives in the snowy mountains, which plays against the dusty Wakanda desert beautifully; this is a gorgeous film to watch.
• Was its story of an untrained, unprepared interloper with war-mongering, ego-driven sensibilities a response to our own political upheaval, or are our global political troubles merely convenient for Black Panther?

On that last point, there's also the obligatory "end credit scene." Though it feels tacked on to this movie, it also provides an intriguing view of where the movie could have gone.  Instead of bringing us car chases and gun battles, how much more intriguing would Black Panther have been if it had spent more time connecting the Wakandan world view to our own, watching what happens when a country that has spent its entire history building walls decided to tear them down.

That's the kind of really fascinating possibility that Black Panther contains, even though it isn't, alas,  the kind of movie the Marvel Cinematic Universe is inclined to make. Black Panther is the first Marvel film with real ideas -- and the irony of that is that it might have been even more intriguing if it hadn't been a Marvel film at all.



Viewed May 6, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5

1415

"Tully"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Like a hipster Mary Poppins, maintaining a coy mysteriousness about her age and dressed in the vaguely inappropriate style of a girl who refuses to grow up, Tully almost magically appears in the life of a woman whose life and whose family is in disarray.

Tully (played with ever-smiling sensitivity by Mackenzie Davis) is a "night nanny," whose job is to give the mother of a newborn some much-needed rest through the evening so, in theory, she can be fresher, more alert and more present for her children and her family the next day.

Hiring Tully isn't the first choice of Marlo (Charlize Theron) or her husband Drew (Ron Livingston), but is instead the brainchild, so to speak, of Marlo's wealthy, supercilious brother (Mark Duplass), who sees how exhausted Marlo is before she even gives birth to her third child. This baby is, to use the charitable turn of phrase, unplanned, and with a precocious daughter and apparently autistic son already taking up more time and headspace than she has available, Marlo overcomes her initial reluctance and calls on Tully.

The younger woman shows up in the middle of the night, almost sneaking in to the house and taking over exactly where Marlo leaves off -- gently waking her in the middle of the night when the baby is hungry, and using the rest of her time to get the house in order and open long-closed doors of thought and conversation with Marlo.

It's not long before Marlo is wearing makeup, going jogging and getting her life back, and this is the point that Diablo Cody's witty, endearing script started losing me -- because despite the female-centric storyline that puts Marlo's frustrations, fears and limitations front and center, there's a weird undercurrent of a more troubling message here: Marlo isn't herself because she isn't pretty.  It's not just sleep-deprivation and exhaustion that have settled in, it's physical ugliness. In one of the film's many one-liners, Marlo's daughter looks at her mother's stretch marks and sagging belly and expresses disgust.

Yet, once Tully arrives, Marlo has time to be more like herself, hiding her tiredness under makeup (which the film later professes to see as a crutch) and blossoming and beaming when she finally has time to exercise and lose weight -- and worry less about her baby.

Meanwhile, Tully views her videogame-obsessed husband and status-obsessed brother with appropriate disdain, but it started making me wonder: According to Tully, who is a worthy person?  It seems only the thin, happy, gentle, well-balanced and impossibly pretty Tully herself is a person to be emulated, and just as this thought started becoming more troublesome in my mind, Tully did something really unexpected that caught me thoroughly off-guard and made me wonder what exactly the movie had been trying to do all along.

At least initially, it doesn't look like even Jason Reitman's confident direction (which includes a very nice eye for place-setting, aided by Eric Steelberg's cinematography) will be able to overcome the quirky storytelling decision that Cody's script takes, especially since such melodramatic, what's-the-meaning-of-it-all silliness ruined Reitman's last film, the genuinely awful Men, Women & Children.

Maybe it's because Charlize Theron is so good -- so honest and sincere, so dry and funny, so willing to take the risks that bring her character surprising depth amid Cody's one-liners -- or maybe it's because the relationship between Marlo and Tully is so fulfilling that Tully overcomes this weird, not-entirely-satisfying turn that had me waffling about whether I liked the movie or whether its last 15 minutes just lost me entirely.

I'm still on the fence about it dramatically, and the too-good-to-be-true Tully herself wears on the nerves a bit with her Earth-Mother patience and encyclopedic knowledge (though Davis is always very good), Tully manages to remain engaging and endearing.

Still, it's interesting to see how screenwriter Cody, whose screenplay for Juno won her an Oscar, doesn't quite have her finger on the way life works for the "little people." Marlo's problems are genuine and overwhelming ones, and the solutions Tully presents often seem just a bit too contrived, especially when Theron works so hard to ground them in an exasperated, resigned reality.




Viewed May 4, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

2020

"The Endless"

 ☆☆½ 

Only after seeing The Endless did I learn that it is part of the bewildering and off-putting trend of movie "cinematic universes," in which characters and settings can't simply be taken for what they are but are connected to other movies that used similar characters and settings.

Coincidentally, The Endless was, when I saw it, accompanied by a trailer for a new movie from the Harry Potter "Wizarding World," a film with the unfortunate and clunky title Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald, a title that I guess makes sense to those who have seen the other movies and read the books and spent time on the websites and are willing to forgive narrative clarity for the sake of feeling like a member of a not-very-private club: The secret handshakes mean that outsiders can never really feel like they belong.

Harry Potter is doing it, the Marvel movies do it, James Bond did it before (and much better than any of the current crop), DC does it, Star Wars does it, and all that is well and good, but now it's affecting the indie film world, too, and a moviegoer that's even more perplexing.  The arthouse seems, at least to me, like one place that should be "universe averse," but here is The Endless to create a sort of Hipster Universe.

And when it comes to The Endless, the filmmakers would no doubt prefer referring to their cinematic universe as a "mythology" -- they even reference H.P. Lovecraft (a world-builder if ever there was one) before the film even begins.  Even if you don't know, as I didn't, that this film is tied to an earlier film by the same filmmakers called Resolution, there's a very clear sense throughout the film that we're missing important pieces of the story puzzle, which can be found in the earlier film and another movie called Spring.

The filmmakers who made these movies are Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. In The Endless, they play brothers named Aaron and Justin, which is either clever or tremendously lazy, it's hard to know which.  Aaron and Justin live a fringe existence in L.A., where they came when they escaped from what they like to call a "UFO death cult" in the dry and rocky mountains east of San Diego.

Justin (played by Justin) is grateful they are out on their own and takes part in regular deprogramming therapy sessions.  Aaron (played by Aaron) has more complex feelings about the place they grew up, and when a mysterious videotape containing footage of one of the cult's members arrives in the mail, Aaron awkwardly talks Justin into heading back to "Camp Arcadia" just for the day. It's an emotionally illogical way to shift the action into the camp, where some very weird stuff is happening.

Once they get there, The Endless vacillates between intriguing sci-fi-tinged drama and some exposition paced so slowly that for a while the film's title seems worryingly accurate.  As they spend time at the camp, first the promised 24 hours, then longer and longer, it is clear that something is very off about the place, and when the camera spins around at one point to reveal two moons in the sky, The Endless perks up.

But it can't quite sustain the eerie drama and disquieting mood, which in part seems to be a problem of having too much "world-building" mythology taking place and not enough honest storytelling.  There are lots of hints of TV's Lost and Westworld in the way it's put together, not to mention Richard Kelly's still-trippy Donnie Darko and Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, but The Endless really struggles with keeping it all cohesive and coherent.

There are some really unsettling moments, and some hints at a really exciting supernatural story, but The Endless can't quite tie it all together; the "reveal" of where they are and what's going on just opens up more doors that never close behind the filmmakers. As storytellers, Moorhead and Benson seem far too interested in setting up the scenarios than seeing them through, and the lack of follow through -- which doomed Lost in its final season -- is largely what bedevils The Endless.

Despite some great imagery and some really fine moments, The Endless can't quite bring it all together, which is a little bit of an irony considering the film's obsession with endless loops.  It builds and builds and builds to a climax that is both under- and overwhelming, and that never explains some of the ideas and key moments are the most key.

A little more focus on this story and a little less satisfaction with connecting The Endless with the filmmakers' other movies (which I haven't seen) would likely have served it well, and brought the film some much-needed tension just at the critical moments when it goes slack.

Fans of hardcore sci-fi-laced fantasy might find much to admire in The Endless, but those of us who go to movies to be entertained and transported, not to solve inscrutable puzzles, will likely just be at first frustrated and then possibly bored -- which is not at all the kinds of emotions you'd expect from a movie about survivors of a UFO death cult.




Viewed April 22, 2018 -- 1415

AMC Sunset 5

"Blockers"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Stop me if this sounds familiar: suburban Chicago (the affluent part), high school, humiliated kids, clueless parents. Blockers is firmly in John Hughes territory, and it aims to both tear down the same stereotypes Hughes mocked -- and upheld -- three decades ago, while affirming just how much some things about the high-school experience are never, ever going to change.

The unexpected thing about Blockers, though, is how it's not so much about the three high-school seniors who are ostensibly at its core, but about their parents. Maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise,  given how much Blockers is in the spirit of both Hughes and early Judd Apatow comedies. The youthful heroes of those movies were always going to grow up, and Blockers is the movie that springs naturally from their anxieties and fears.

It wouldn't be too hard, really, to imagine that Lisa, Mitchell and Hunter, the 40-something parents whose neuroses fuel Blockers, as the Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall characters from The Breakfast Club all grown up and with kids of their own. Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz, who play the parents, bear more than a passing resemblance, and maybe this is what happens to a generation that imagined themselves to be more liberal, more open-minded than their own parents: They grow up to be just as uptight and worried as the people who raised them.

Of course, they don't imagine themselves that way. They all think they're the cool parents, though their daughters would certainly disagree. Julie is the "pretty one," an only child whose mother dotes on her; Kayla is the sporty one, whose father bonds with her over athletics and whose mom takes a hands-off attitude; Sam is the shy, quiet one, embarrassed by both her self-absorbed mother and absent father.

Blockers takes place on their prom night, and the movie wastes precious little time setting up the characters and their predicaments: One of the best things about the movie is how it jumps right in and lets the characters find and form themselves over time.

There's rather a lot on the mind of Blockers -- the trouble parents have letting go, the perils teens have finding their own way, the pressures that are put on them to use sex (and drugs and alcohol) as ways of fitting in. All of that is there, and all of it is explored by director Kay Cannon in unexpected depth, but more than anything Blockers wants to make you laugh, and it does -- a lot, and consistently.

The humor in Blockers is bawdy, naughty and sometimes downright raunchy, but it almost never feels gratuitous, not even when one character consumes beer in a most unexpected way, another winds up inches away from a middle-aged penis, and another ends up in bed with a drug addict.

Put in those terms, Blockers seems, well, inappropriate at best and straining for laughs at worst, and yet it's neither; it's weirdly sweet, and it's always working hard for some pretty big laughs.  The adult actors -- Mann, Cena and Barinholtz -- work spectacularly well together, and the movie hits the pause button on the crude stuff just long enough for a serious reality check: This is a movie about high schoolers having sex, made in the era of #MeToo and at a time when there's some really interesting reflection going on about those indispensable-but-sometimes-questionable Hughes films.  (If you haven't read it, this essay by Molly Ringwald is fascinating, and seems perfectly timed for the release of Blockers.) A scene in which one of the girls' moms (played by Sarayu Blue) questions the sanity of the other adults is just about perfect, and keeps the laughs coming.

What the parents are trying to do, by the way, is stop their kids from having sex, a premise that could, and maybe should, come across as lurid but seems eminently reasonable given the way these people have approached the rearing of their children in the first place.

For most of the film, the kids have no idea what their parents are up to, and the only time the movie loses just a little bit of its momentum is when everyone figures it out.

The rest of the time, Blockers is most noteworthy less for its wacky concept than for the way it treats all three of the girls with immense respect, as wholly formed people who have their own specific perspectives and foibles.  The actresses who play them, Kathryn Newton (Julie), Geraldine Viswanathan (Kayla) and Gideon Adlon (Sam), have created three wonderfully realized characters.  They could be front and center in their own movie, and this is a rare film that warrants a sequel: It would be fun to see how the three of them fare after the credits roll.

But as much as Blockers proudly shows off three young women who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, it's mostly about the parents who are struggling to see their daughters grow up. The lengths they'll go to in order to prevent time from moving forward, to stop the world from changing, are a little ridiculous, sometimes outrageous -- the way all of us act when we realize time is passing right by us.

Those kids are going to grow up, whether we're ready or not, which is exactly what they've always done.




Viewed April 7, 2018 -- Laemmle Noho

1650

"A Quiet Place"

 ☆☆☆½ 

So much of A Quiet Place is so right, so tense and tremendously well-crafted, that it's not until after the perfect last shot that you start thinking ... and wondering ... and scratching your head.

That's what happened with the audience that had moments ago been shrieking with glee; on the way out, you heard people wondering, "But ... ," and "If ... ," and "So ... ," and none of that harms the movie at all during its spare and taut running time, but drains it of some of its post-viewing potency.

Parts of A Quiet Place bear resemblance to other films and TV shows, especially the Alien movies and "Lost," but it takes a while for A Quiet Place to fall into the realm of familiarity.  It's the setup, which feels both fresh and expertly told, that really hooks us:

A family scrounges for supplies in a town that appears to have been ravaged during an apocalyptic event, and they're being very quiet about it.  Something is forcing their silence, something much more sinister and dire than the fact that the teenage daughter is deaf.  There's something desperate about the way the mother communicates with her kids through sign language, about the way the pre-teen son  keeps so quiet, and the father insists that his youngest child put down a toy, telling him, "It's too loud."

This long, unspeakably tense prologue ends in a tragedy that drives the most human of emotions that are on display throughout the rest of the film, and sets up a core conflict between two of the characters that offers some surprising emotional depth to the movie.

It's also visually a stunner, and that may be the biggest surprise of the film -- that its lead actor, John Krasinski, is also the director, and that he has a magnificent visual style and a bold storytelling ability.   Starring with his real-life wife Emily Blunt, along with tremendous supporting work by Millicent Simmonds as their deaf daughter and Noah Jupe as their skittish son, Krasinski makes the first part of the film work best.

There's almost no dialogue, the story reveals itself in inventive ways, and we come to realize that what's going on involves monsters from outer space.  It's almost a little bit of a letdown to discover that the movie is going to take its alien-invasion concept so literally; the setup is so spectacular that it's hard to imagine it having a fulfilling payoff.

But it does, mostly -- especially as the movie separates its main characters in order place them all in maximum peril.  And throughout, A Quiet Place dazzles by focusing on its novel conceit: That the aliens attack people based on sound, and that everyone, at all times, must be very, very, very quiet.

This works wonderfully, except, alas, when it doesn't, and perhaps its a testament to Krasinski as a director and a screenwriter (he wrote the script with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) that the enormous effort to close some of the plot holes doesn't feel as obvious as it is.  But the primary problem is that A Quiet Place can't close them all, and eventually logic wiggles its way into the back of your head while you watch the movie: Doesn't that make a noise?  How come the scary monsters can hear that and not that?  And why, for Pete's sake, would any reasonable husband and wife decide it's a good idea to bring a crying, screaming, noisy baby into a world that demands silence?

Though the movie runs only 90 minutes, for about 15 or 20 precious minutes those huge plot holes threaten to overwhelm the movie, and might succeed if everything didn't pivot to a numbingly tense scene in a grain silo that triggers a real whopper of an ending, all of it leading up to a final moment that has to rank as one of the most satisfying of any horror film.

A Quiet Place is a squealing, squirming, fist-clenching delight, as long as you keep reminding your brain -- which may start nagging you about some of the things you're seeing -- of the only rule in the film that matters: "Just shut up."




Viewed April 6, 2018 -- Arclight Sherman Oaks

2015